The What and Whatiful Who

by cosby7

CHAPTER ONE: Complicated Biology

Knock! Knock! Knock!

Door opening sound.

“Twilight! I’m glad you’re here.”

“Does that mean you’re aware of the crisis as well, Doctor?”

“Yes, yes, of course. Come in, come in. You can help me solve it right now. I think I’m on to something.”

Twilight and Spike hurried inside the stately blue home of the curiously inconspicuous Doctor Hooves. He was not a well known player in the events of Equestria, but Twilight knew that the mysterious stallion with an hour glass on his flank, while eccentric, was quite brilliant. He appeared to be only an earth pony, though Twilight was not even entirely certain of that, she had once seen him push a young filly out of the way of a falling piano by creating a chain of events that started with the throw of a single pebble. Wherever the expertise of Doctor Hooves lay, he clearly had a genius analytical mind, an attention to detail that impressed even her, and, if his checkouts from the library were any indication, a brilliant grasp of science in general. More importantly, during the scarce occasions upon which Twilight had visited the Doctor before, usually due to him forgetting to return a book he had borrowed, she noticed that his own library of tomes and scrolls was not in any way lacking in its own right. Specifically, she noticed that he had far more books than even the Canterlot archives on the subject and theory of time. No, it did not surprise Twilight in the least that Doctor Hooves already had a handle on the chaos that afflicted Ponyville. He would know what to do, she told herself, as she followed the brown colt with the sticky-uppy mane to a small table in the middle of his living room.

“This apple,” Doctor Hooves said. Indeed, there, on the table, was an apple. He stared at it intently. It looked yummy.

“Yes?” Twilight replied, not entirely sure where this was going.

“Is yellow.”

Spike and Twilight exchanged a look askance. Nuh uh.

“Um, no. I’m pretty sure that apple is red.”

“Red!” the Doctor exclaimed. “That’s what red looks like! Yellow is that other color. The yellowy one. Huzzah! Wait, no. Huzzah’s not cool. Forget I said ‘Huzzah.’ I said ‘Huzzooh.’ Much more cool.”

“I, um, I guess?” Twilight and Spike exchanged another baffled look. All this eyebrow raising was giving them a workout.

“Well, that took most of my Saturday, but it was worth it. Thanks for the help, Twilight.”

“But . . . it’s Tuesday?”

“Is it? Right. Course it is. Still not use to the whole ‘days’ thing yet. Linearity and all. Feels more like a big,” Doctor Hooves paused, allowing his mouth to contort unappetizingly around the word, “pile.”

“O-kay,” Twilight replied skeptically. On the up side, it did sound like he was talking about time stuff. On the down side, he sounded less eccentric and more like an out and out nut. She worried that getting anything more than confusion out of this pony might be a more difficult task than she had thought. “But that actually wasn’t the problem I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Oh? ‘Course not. I’m sure you have your own problems to worry about. And I am the Doctor. Did I mention I’m the Doctor? ‘Help’ is my middle name. Well, actually it’s not. Well, actually it is. But that’s not really here nor there. It’s on Rygellium 3. Say what you will about the Rygelliminiums, but they do enjoy their music. You lend them one album and you wear it like a badge of honor for the rest of your life. Which in my case is a very long time. Personally, I wanted to be ‘Revolver,’ don’t you think that sounds cool? Revolver? Ah, I love it! But it’s better than walking around being called ‘Magical Mystery Tour.’ Introductions would be atrocious.”

“Doctor, please!” This guy had to be some relation of Pinkie Pie. “Just listen for a minute!”

“What do you mean, ‘listen?’ I’ve been listening the whole time. You have a problem. Something about something or other. I always get accused of that. ‘Not listening.’ What does that even mean? If you want me to listen, have something interesting to say. I can’t just stand around all day waiting for conversation to just—”

“Shut up! Would you just be quiet for one minute! We have a time EMERGENCY! The fabric of reality is collapsing in on the whole city and who in the hoof knows where else, we don’t have the Elements of Harmony, I can’t get in contact with the Princess,” she gave Spike a hard shake, eliciting a mild hiccup and nothing more, “See? I don’t know what to do and you just won’t stop talking!” Twilight panted heavily, out of breath from her sudden outburst. Her nostrils flared as she snorted loudly in an obvious show of rage.

Doctor Hooves left her like that for a moment, not willing to risk the anger any probing might yet yield. Only when she seemed to calm down a bit did he finally ask, “Did you say ‘time emergency?’”

“That’s correct,” Twilight replied, doing her best to regain her composure. “I thought you knew, but I guess you had,” her eyes sardonically shifted to the red apple still resting on the table, before rolling back into focus on the Doctor, “other things to occupy you. Just take a look outside. It’s chaos!”

“I seriously doubt it can be as bad as all that,” the pony replied casually, with a step toward his front door. He walked over in a practiced show of nonchalance, and gave the door a light shove. “See? Nothing to be concerned a—”

The dinosaur on the Doctor’s doorstep let out a mighty roar, a mere foot from his face. He could not help but notice the beast’s breath carried an oddly metallic smell before coming to terms with the fact that each of its teeth had a bright yellow, wait, red, laser sight, pointing directly at his head. And then it disappeared.

Doctor Hooves’s jaw fell to the floor.

“Uh huh,” Twilight remarked derisively as the purple glow of her magic picked Hooves’s jaw off the floor and returned it to its default position. “I see what you mean. No problems here.”

“Twilight! This is a massive time emergency!”

“You think?”

“No, you don’t even understand. This is enormously wrong. Just . . . very, very wrong. How could I have not noticed this?”

“Perception filter?”

“You can’t just say ‘perception filter’ every time someone doesn’t notice something that should have been incredibly obvious. That’s just being lazy.”

“Pinkie, get out of here!” Twilight grouchily yelled at the bubbly interloper.

“Okie dokie lokie!”

“You were right to bring this to me, Twilight. I just hope it’s not too late already,” the Doctor groused, scratching at his head distractedly.

“I knew this couldn’t be Discord.”

“Well, it is, actually.”

“What? But you said—”

“But it isn’t. That . . . is very strange.” Doctor Hooves furrowed his brow in a show of genuine puzzlement. “There is something more at work here. Time and space are folding in on your world in a series of endlessly self-perpetuating paradoxes. Each one is allowed to exist because the next one forces it to exist. It should be impossible. There is a definite influence on the direct time-line of Ponyville at work, but, even so, the abilities of a draconequus are not easily mistaken. They are so powerful that their presence literally warps reality around them. Chaos is not even really a desire for them; it’s an instinct. They force reality to reshape itself around them, simply by existing. That’s why their planet couldn’t last. Too much,” the Doctor stopped, playing with the word in his mouth, “fluctuation.”

“You talk about Discord like he’s a space alien or something.”

He turned his face toward hers, but it looked to Twilight like he was not really speaking to her. His eyes weren’t there. They were looking somewhere else. Somewhere infinitely more distant.

“Everyone is an alien to someone.” He clicked his jaw absent-mindedly before once more looking to Twilight in earnest.

“Well, alien or not, we still have to stop this. It doesn’t matter who’s causing it. What do we need to do?” The situation was only going further out of hoof and Twilight was quickly growing desperate.

“The only thing that can stem the tide of a draconequus is an even greater force of order and stability. Some sort of a, mmm, reality . . . constant . . . keeping . . . thing.” The Doctor held his mouth open in a look of deep concentration, suggesting he had more to say. “Yeah.”

Guess not.

“The only thing like that is the magic created by the Elements of Harmony.”

“The stabilization field created by the Elements of Harmony.”

“Huh?”

“No such thing as magic.”

Twilight was flabbergasted. There were other things going on, but a statement such as this surely could not stand with the young unicorn.

“Excuse me, but how can you even say that? Magic is everywhere in Equestria. Every unicorn is magic,” she said, dipping her horn into view to punctuate the point.

“For centuries your people have studied and developed magic as a science. It is a very complex science, but science all the same.”

Twilight rolled her eyes. “You know as well as I do, Doctor, that magic does not follow the same rules as any other science. It defies the rules of gravity, the three laws of thermodynamics, energy conversion; it’s called magic precisely because it can’t be explained by science. If that’s not magic, then what would you call it?” she finished smugly.

The Doctor looked nonplussed. “Complicated biology.”

“‘Complicated biology?’” she retorted incredulously.

A quick blink was the only sign the Doctor had heard her at all.

“Very complicated biology. Not that different from a draconequus actually.”

“Now you’re just being stubborn.”

“Magic is something of completely unexplainable power and origin,” he began in a lecturing tone. “It is not tied into the biology of any one species such as the abilities of the unicorn or the instinctual carpentry skills of the miglobilliums.”

Twilight frowned. He had to be making some of this up.

“A universal power source of unexplainable origin and strength that can be drawn upon by any species simply does not exist. The only thing that might be even slightly comparable to actual magic would be—”

“Friendship?”

“Pinkie!”

“Whoops, sorry!”

The lavender unicorn groaned in unmistakable frustration. She made sure to wait until her excitable friend had left before continuing.

“Fine, fine. This isn’t the time to be arguing semantics.” We’ll save that for later, she thought with a sinister chuckle that was probably not out loud. She hoped. “The question is: Do you think the Elements can help?”

At that question, Doctor Hooves revealed the first truly pained expression Twilight had seen him wear. That only made her worry more.

“Oh, Twilight Sparkle. I’m sorry. I’m very, very sorry. But you really don’t know how bad this is.”

“Wh-what do you mean?” Twilight stammered nervously.

An uncomfortable groan escaped the stallion’s mouth. Clearly, the next sentence he had prepared was not his favorite.

“The Elements of Harmony,” he began only to bite his lip in a show of discomfort, “strictly speaking,” and then a squint, “may no longer exist.”

Comments

[SnootBooper]

...dafuq am i reading? well i have no idea but im liking it :D