"Parallel—" said Windfall, slowly and carefully, wanting very much to be certain whether she had heard the alicorn correctly or not. "—universes."
"That's right," Twilight confirmed.
Windfall had a hard time taking in the concept. She understood both words, but placed together… She decided to take it one step at a time. "If they're parallel, that means they never meet, right?"
"Ah! A fan of geometry?"
"Trig, actually. Comes in very useful for artillery calculations. Wouldn't want to drop a rock on the wrong target."
"Oh." Twilight stared at her for a moment and then shook her head and got back on track. "You're right; the universes never meet, but cross-connections can be made. I've used one, myself!"
Twilight fully expected Windfall to pepper her with questions about travelling to another universe, but the mercenary mare was too practical in the face of an unknown (albeit hogtied) threat. "So what do these connections look like? Can we find it and shove the maniac back through it back to wherever she came from?"
"They're mirrors usually. At least that's what Starswirl always used. But they can look like anything. A door, a book, or even an overstuffed green velvet chair."
Windfall really did want to ask about that last item, but persisted. "So, can we find this connection, dump her back in, and break it so it doesn't work anymore?"
Twilight sighed. "She probably made the original, so I don't think that would be a long-term solution."
Windfall thought for a moment and then said, "Look, don't take this the wrong way, but…"
"Go on."
"I know she's you, sort of, but she's a pretty damned evil version of you—"
"I absolutely agree. Go on."
"So… If you do your magic on my horseshoes, and mojo up a nice sharp knife, I could…" Windfall winced at the horrified look on Twilight's face. "I'll make it quick and painless, I promise!"
Twilight opened her mouth to forbid Windfall from doing any such thing. But she paused and slowly closed it again. She would be the sole ruler of Equestria soon. She would undoubtedly have life and death decisions to make. She had to be ready to make those decisions based on what was best for the kingdom and not her personal feelings.
The twisted, giant version of herself had been directly responsible for the seemingly pointless deaths of many ponies at the very least, and given the methodical nature of her bizarre labyrinth, would continue destroying equine lives in pursuit of her own ends... If she wasn't stopped.
Twilight's horn lit and half of the mass of Windfall's front shoes flowed away in a swirl of twinkling lights. The cloud settled on the tunnel floor into a straight, thin blade.
"The edge is only one molecule thick," Twilight said in an unsteady voice. "Be careful."
After giving Twilight a surprised look, Windfall took up the knife in a practiced pastern grip and turned toward the huge, bound alicorn.
She was awake and watching them.
"Uh," Twilight began. "I'm sorry, but—"
The world twisted in on itself and both Twilight and Windfall staggered and cried out. It felt to them as if they were simultaneously being frozen and roasted alive while being shredded under a field harrow. But the gigantic pony was screaming, too.
The agony ended after what seemed like an eternity. Twilight staggered to her hooves and called out to the other alicorn, "Don't use magic again! Don't cast anything, or we—"
As might be expected, the maniac didn't listen.
The three of them were only briefly affected the second time, because the maniac had attempted to break through what she thought was a suppressor of some sort with shere power. If it had been any sort of normal magic-nullifying ring, she would have easily blown it off her horn in a cloud of metallic gas. As it was, she merely increased the power of the spell woven into the steel cone. Before she passed out, one of the least unpleasant sensations Windfall experienced was the feeling that her own teeth were trying to burrow upwards into her brain.
Twilight had been partially prepared to resist the side effects of her magic disrupting matrix. She instantly cast a double shield around herself on a frequency that mirrored the two unequal "legs" of additional mana that the sigils on her steel cone added onto the maniac's spells.
It was just barely enough dampening to allow her to retain consciousness. The tunnel around her went out of focus briefly and then settled back into clarity. Twilight was fairly certain that the distortion had nothing to do with her own eyes. She dropped her shields and staggered over to look at the unconscious alicorn.
The cone that generated the disruptive additions was distorted as if it had been exposed to extreme heat. Twilight realized that it wouldn't survive many more such blasts of magic, assuming that the pulses of distorted waveforms it generated didn't kill all of them or collapse the tunnel first. Twilight was astounded that the big alicorn had only knocked herself out. The monster had been in direct contact with the sabotaged mana flow; and after feeling it from a distance and through a powerful defensive shield, Twilight could hardly believe that the alicorn's attempt at escape hadn't physically torn her apart.
Twilight looked around to find Windfall out cold, but still breathing. Fortunately, when the pegasus had dropped the ultra sharp knife, it had fallen clear of her body.
"Windfall! Wake up!" She nudged the pony's shoulder with a hoof. There was no response.
If Twilight risked waiting for Windfall to wake up first, she'd risk everything. It was up to her to do what had to be done.
A wave of nausea swept over her as she lit her horn and levitated the knife.
= = =
Windfall vomited up a bit of half digested grass as she woke. Her head swam and she couldn't see anything. The darkness around her was complete. But she definitely heard something. A pony was crying somewhere nearby. She got her aching legs under her body but wisely decided not to try standing up.
She smelled blood. "Princess?" she croaked out.
The weeping quieted, but it didn't stop entirely. There was a noise as if somepony had tried to speak, but they only managed a strangled sound.
"Twilight! Are you okay? I can't see anything!"
"Don't..." The word was half a sob.
Windfall tried to stand then, but wobbled and fell back to her knees. She crawled in the direction of the crying. "Hang on, Princess. I'm coming."
When she got close, she could smell the blood. She reached out and her hoof contacted something warm and solid. A little nearer, and she got a leg around what seemed to be Twilight's hips. Windfall squeezed lightly and said, "It's okay. I'm here." It was a ludicrously awkward hug, but it was all she could manage.
"I—I couldn't do it," Twilight sobbed.
Windfall didn't need to be told what "it" was. "She's still alive?"
The pegasus felt her nod, and pulled herself up to a sitting position using Twilight's shoulder for support. "When she wakes up, are we going to—"
"She's awake now," Twilight said.
"What? Are you…" Windfall was getting a little irritated at having to guess at what had gone on while she was out. "Can you make some light?"
"I—I hope you don't hate me for this. I couldn't kill her, so I…" A faint violet light formed at the tip of Twilight's horn, and it was all Windfall needed to see what was beyond her.
The huge alicorn lay beneath a hemisphere of magic, her face contorted in an ugly snarl of rage. She was screaming something, but no sound reached the two ponies outside the bubble. Broad streaks of blood flowed down over her face from where her horn… wasn't.
The long spire, still encased in Twilight's improvised steel cone, lay outside of the shield spell in its own separate puddle of blood.
Windfall's first thought was that it was a clever and reasonable solution for a pony adverse to killing. Her second thought was that it was obvious that Twilight was on the edge of falling apart and that she'd better get her snapped out of her funk and headed for an exit as soon as possible.
"We need to get out of here, Princess. Help me up."
Twilight and Windfall used each other for support as they got to their hooves. Windfall surreptitiously scooped up the bloody knife and very, very carefully tucked it under one wing. She hoped they wouldn't need any weapons, now that the maniac was neutralized, but she wasn't going to be caught unprepared if they did.
"How long will that shield hold, Princess?"
"A day, maybe? If her Earth magic is proportionately as strong, and if she snaps that wire and starts kicking… I don't know. An hour or so?"
"Then we'd better get a move on, unless you want me to finish the job."
Twilight shook her head violently. "No… Just… No. Let's go."
The huge alicorn suddenly stopped struggling and silently screaming, and rolled over to where she could touch the floor of the tunnel with one of her bound wingtips. The maneuver rolled her hips so that her cutie mark was clearly visible for the first time.
Twilight stared. It was her mark, of course, but the five smaller white stars were gone. They weren't missing; dark smears something like burn marks had replaced them.
"C'mon, Princess! Let's get—"
"No, look!" Twilight pointed, not at the distorted cutie mark, but at where the maniac had used the tip of a primary feather to write a single word on the floor in her own blood: TIME
"Buck that, Princess! We need to—"
But Twilight walked away from the pegasus and toward the other alicon. She looked at the word for a few seconds and then said, "I'm going to alter the shield to allow sound to pass outward. If you try anything, like knocking us out with the Royal Voice, I'll seal it back up and we will leave, understood?"
The giant under the bubble nodded her bloody head. There was something wrong with her eyes. The edges of her irises shaded from the expected purple to a metallic gold near the edges.
Windfall gritted her teeth. Every bit of her long experience in perilous situations told her that immediate flight was the only safe course to take. But Twilight hadn't steered her wrong yet, and she wasn't going to leave her friend alone with the monster.
"All Equestria is in deadly peril," were the first words the giant spoke. She spit them out in a carefully enunciated staccato, as if speaking to a dim-witted foal.
"Your Equestria," Twilight replied.
"No!" The huge pony kept herself from snarling out the reply only with a huge effort of will. "Our Equestria. This Equestria!" She slapped the word she had written on the floor with a bloody wingtip, turning it into an illegible smear. "You're from my past, not a different dimension."
Twilight eyes narrowed. "I don't believe you. I would never—"
"Say that again in a thousand years! Or two thousand, or five! You have no idea what you're capable of, you infant! You mewling pupa!"
"She kicked your gigantic ass," Windfall helpfully pointed out.
The maniac turned her gaze to the pegasus. The golden borders of her irises sparkled in an eerie and menacing way, and Windfall instantly regretted saying anything.
The strand of wire binding the huge alicorn's left foreleg snapped with a loud twang as she raised her hoof in an imperious gesture. "You worthless fragment of—"
Her words were cut off and the shield went semi-opaque as Twilight's horn blazed.
"Stop it!" Twilight's voice wasn't loud, but it carried a tone of absolute authority. "I am willing to hear you out, but only if you speak calmly and refrain from insults and threats. Otherwise I will collapse this tunnel on top of you and worry about the implications later."
The bloody alicorn lowered her hoof and studied Twilight for a long moment. Then she nodded.
Twilight altered the shield again and said, "Give me the most concise summary of the situation that you can."
Behind her, Windfall muttered low under her breath, "Oh blistering wind, this ought to be good."
= = =
=
This is somehow going to be Celestia's fault isn't it?
Right, "Twilight will not outlive her friends" meant that the alternative was turning into *gestures* that. Now she has to come up with a way to make that happen in a universe where it isn't a given.
Well. This will be interesting, to say the least.
Yikes. I see what you mean.
10473756
Isn't everything?
10473779
Simple expressions of complex situations, are nearly always misleading.
Imagine how much fun we wouldn't be having if this was a simple problem.
10473779
I always considered that Celestia turned her into an alicorn to prevent that from happening, only to ensure that she died a horrific and brutal death at the claws of g1's Catrina.
I always had an image of her being depicted as Equestria's version of Bane. Breaking Twilight and company by releasing the terrible trio to commit a whole bunch of petty crimes just to prove how ineffective twilight is as a ruler, put strain on her relations with the other bearers, and then breaking her by using that artifact that Ahziolt used to force the truth out of people on Celestia proceeding to ask her various question about Twilight's adventures and the choices she made. When Celestia shows how little she seems to care by saying that truely believes that everything would be fine in the end despite how many people got caught in the crossfire and how much of these dangers could have been avoided if Celestia had simply done her job. Catrina decides that the only way to break this delusion is to kill twilight right then and there with the ending scene of Catrina raking a single claw over twilight's throat, slitting it.
without friends it a easy to become a villain worse then nightmare moon especially if you think it to save equestria
"Magic destroying"?
... I mean if we're still speaking waves... active noise-canceling? I mean that's the first thought that came to me on that and it's kinda flawed...
Sooo, future Twilight... Maybe from an alternate timeline. This does not seem like a closed loop. Although, I guess the loop — if we look at the conventional diagram for such an explanation — could branch too, without actually changing the outcome.
Ahhhh too much hypothesizing and assuming.
I'm thrilled for the next chapter!
10474221
Hmn... yeah, that "magic destroying" isn't accurate. It should either be "spell destroying" or "magic disrupting." Energy and form are different, after all.
Thanks for pointing that out. I'll fix it!
"I don't believe you. I would never—"
I mean, a quite plausible continuation of that is "--forget, when abducting my past self, what said past self did to her then-future self, i.e. me, and how well that went. So either you're lying, you believe time is so immutable that you have to both lose and act like you're surprised about it even though you should have known it was coming, in which case I'm not sure what you think you can do to avert this peril, or you didn't remember this because it didn't happen when you were me, indicating that apparently you've already worked out how to change the past... and decided that the best way to combat the peril wasn't coming to warn and work with me, but kidnapping and killing a succession of ponies culminating in me. So I'm not denying that you couldn't possibly be a future version of me -- no one expected Nightmare Moon ahead of time, after all -- I'm saying it seems pretty unlikely that you're both telling the truth and in your right mind, possible future version of me and possibly still extant peril or not."
...So, yes, I'm still not very inclined to trust this other Twilight's word. :D
(Though provided it can be done safely, I don't think Twilight's wrong to listen to her; after all, even if I'm not missing something, she might not be lying, just crazy and/or badly mistaken with such manifesting in her attempted solutions rather than the fabrication of the problem.)
This story takes interesting turns. I wonder whither it goes.
Work is hard with my left arm.
I voted yesterday and mailed my ballot.
10474816
While the simple spell Twilight used in It's About Time created what apparently was a closed time-like loop, paradoxical causality doesn't restrict "downstream" events when using the altered form of time travel that Starlight did. From Future Twilight's perspective, she may have never undergone the labyrinth procedure.
10475355
Right, I covered that too; sorry if the paragraph was too wall-of-texty and that got lost.
(Note after typing the rest: this got kind of long too, so just to be clear up here as well, the following sort-of rant is at, if anyone, maybe-future-Twilight, not you. :D)
The problem there is, if this maybe-future-Twilight is using magic that can change the past, why do what she's doing? Why not start by just talking to Twilight and explaining the problem; her words'd be a lot easier to trust then, presumably, and there'd be less risk of the two Twilights fighting each other and reducing their ability to save Equestria. Twilight could even be betrayed later, if that's really needed, from a much closer position.
So unless the threat is one with an implausibly specific set of requirements to combat (enough that Twilight Sparkle decides to open with "murder labyrinth" instead of "talking"), that scenario still doesn't seem to add up, at least for the maybe-future-Twilight being sane.
Of course, one sub-possibility is that this isn't what she started with, and she's already used up all the better-seeming ideas, failing and restarting each time. But that also seems unlikely to be good for her sanity.
Then there's also the question of just how hard exactly this peril must be to avert if Twilight can travel, apparently, thousands of years back into the past, and yet still have such apparent difficulty saving Equestria from it. We saw with Starlight that stopped the rainboom was able to drastically chance the future, but also that slight differences in how it was stopped, propagating over what looks to be less than two decades, could result in major difference in the details of the new future.
Again, perhaps there are a lot of constraints we don't know about yet... but every additional complexity to this alicorn's story is more that must be believed, and she hasn't exactly earned a lot of starting trust with our present Twilight.
...So, yeah, just to be clear, I'm not complaining about the story this comment thread is attached to on this website, but the in-universe explanation for her actions maybe-future-Twilight's given strikes me as very fishy.
I'm currently guessing it's mostly likely either insanity, or that this isn't actually a future Twilight at all.
Though I'm still open to you surprising both me and Windfall here. :D
I suppose we'll just have to see. :)
10476527
Oh, go right ahead! She deserves it!
It's hard to address any of that without giving away the game. (In fact, I just deleted several paragraphs that weren't elliptical enough... )
There was one bit that might be totally unhelpful, though:
Suppose we invented time travel tech at the same time we learned that global climate change had passed a critical tipping point that would result in inexorable heating that would turn Earth into something resembling Venus. Which Baby Hitler would we go back and kill to prevent that? Stupid question, I know. But how would you prevent something that is a gradual process that's entangled in the advance of technology?
10476999
Hah, thanks. :D
Though, yeah, sorry, I realize I may also be jumping the gun. :D
and re the last two paragraphs:
See, I don't know off the top of my head the best way to do that (there are a lot of possibilities, and a lot of potential things the exact mechanics of the time travel could enable or prevent, or swing more positive expected values towards or away from), but I'm pretty sure that "travel several thousand years into the past and open a murder labyrinth" is not likely to be high on the list of good solutions. :D
10477262
Very true. "Open a murder labyrinth" is a very specific technical solution that should only be used in cases where the queen gives birth to a monstrous hybrid creature.
10477341
Heh. :D
...Though, really, that does seem a rather strange course of action even then, I have to say. :D
10477341
It took me entirely too long to realize you were specifically referring to the Bull of Minos. Mostly because I always see poor Asterius as the least monstrous being in that whole kerfuffle.
10478590
I know, right? Even when the victors write the history, their unconsciously biased viewpoint lets hints of a different take slip through.
10478297
There is an obvious answer:
i.imgur.com/KAIns.jpg
10478625
Hah! Okay, yes, that explanation I do not believe I had thought of. :D
Yeah, the sheer quantity of issues with this Twilight allegedly being from far in the future has been described in considerable detail, from murder labyrinths on up. Though I'll add "Daedalight remembers what her favorite brand of shampoo was several millennia ago, but not how she'd react to a howling madmare" to the pile.
Mind you, thousands of years is a long time. If we go by forking timelines, we could just be looking at a worst-case scenario. It's not like the potential Twilights running awe-inspiring utopias have a reason to visit their twentysomething self.
10483639
"Daedalight" nearly made me snort coffee through my nose. Good job!
P.S. I ship it.
Well, at least Present Twi won't die if they dont want to cause a paradox.
Where's the fun in that?
Missing.space.