Double Rainbow

by theworstwriter

Chapter 15

“Okay, Dash. So you’re confident you can do it exactly the way I just described? We can’t afford even the slightest mistake.”

“Yeah, yeah… I’ve got this. It won’t be a problem.”

“Okay. I trust you. So with that taken care of, we just need to confirm that the OTHER ponies involved can handle it. I’ll need you to make sure they can do their parts as well as you do yours.”

“You’ve already got some ponies in mind? I was wondering how you were gonna find awesome enough fliers. Who d’ya got for me? I’ll whip ‘em into shape in no time!”

Twilight Sparkle flashed a wry smile as she opened the door to the library and stood to one side. “Rainbow Dash, I present to you: The Wonderbolts.”

The brief silence was ended by an ear splitting squeal. This would be the most awesome thing EVER. Not only would Rainbow Dash be taking the lead on a stunt unlike any ever performed, but she would be leading a team to do it. And not just any team, either. She would be leading The Wonderbolts! It was unbelievable! Never, not even in her wildest dreams, had the simple weather pony thought she would be taking part in something this… EPIC. Even if she could convince herself that this was real, the whole thing was pushed straight into the realm of the inconceivable by the fact that she was going to be commanding her idols. She knew she would never forget this day, and neither would anypony in Equestria. Everything else paled in comparison. This would truly be the BEST. DAY. EVER.

For a variety of reasons from breaking records to saving Equestria to pushing the boundaries of magic and/or science (it was hard to tell what exactly Twilight was talking about) it would go down in history… probably. Stupid Twilight and her stupid crazy theories.

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“Rainbow!” Applejack galloped toward the rainbow maned pegasus hovering nearby. “Ya got any idea what’s goin’ on?”

“Oh, hey Applejack. Not really, no.” Rainbow Dash landed in front of the earth pony. “Just that there are two Ponyvilles for some reason.”

“Call it a hunch, but ah think Twilight mighta had somethin’ ta do with it.” The farmer sighed and stepped toward the other mare, nuzzling her softly. “Ah thought we’d finally settled this whole business.”

The cyan pegasus backed away, a look of surprise and confusion on her face. Her wings drifted a short distance upward. “Um… what business are we talking about here?”

Applejack cocked her head to one side and stared at Rainbow Dash for a few seconds before returning her head to its normal position and trying to suppress a slowly growing smile. She could get mad at Twilight and/or Rainbow Dash for causing all the time troubles later. For now, she had a Dash in front of her that didn’t know her feelings were mutual. A Dash that would be far too afraid or embarrassed to let anypony know how she felt. She was SO cute when she was embarrassed…

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The four prized pupils of Princess Celestia stood in a small circle.

“Okay then. So to recap, in my timeline nopony travels through time at all. The first Dash didn’t come back and none of this happened. Applejack and Rainbow Dash have feelings for each other, but haven’t admitted that to each other yet. In your timeline, the Princess was visiting the library when the first Dash came back. She was there when you realized you were going to invent time travel and set everything in motion. She wisely cautioned you about making things more complicated than they needed to be, and it was eventually agreed that after Dash returned to the future there would be no more time travel. Dash told herself that everything would work out and she just needed to tell Applejack how she felt. She did, and it worked. She then returned to the future and that was that. In your timeline,” Twilight Sparkle pointed a hoof toward the chalkboard covered in equations and charts and graphs, “THAT happened. And in YOUR timeline,” the unicorn she was referring to shivered in place, one eye twitching rapidly, “everything went completely out of control. You somehow managed to keep it all in line with Pinkie Pie’s help, at the cost of the majority of your sanity.”

Twilight Sparkle paused, both to catch her breath and to give the others time to make any corrections. “Now in all of your timelines, almost everything managed to stay tied up neatly. The only missing link is from the beginning to the end. In each case, the Dash that went back the furthest was somehow able to lock onto a signature and draw power from a time where neither should have been available. Somehow, a strange sort of split-wormhole formed that didn’t have a simple point to point relationship. Entering from the future point lead back to the past, but there was nothing to enter from the past side. Since nothing from the past locked onto the future, that left the signature open for use. Those were used by the last Dashes to come forward, making the forward and backward links from that point connect to different points in space and time. This makes a complete circuit, so that each Dash has one smooth and continuous path through the time jumps that begins and ends at the same point. It’s all very elegant, but it leaves a very pressing question that none of you were able to come up with an answer to. How did the energies and signatures used to tie off the earliest point in the series get there? And perhaps MORE pressing, what happened to put so much of a strain on the space-time continuum that random chunks of matter are phasing between timelines?”

Twilight Sparkle paused again, but was interrupted by herself before she could continue. “Are we really supposed to believe it’s a coincidence that every chunk has included us? And that the chunks just happened to all land at roughly the same coordinates, at roughly the same time, in the same timeline?”

“Of course not,” chimed Twilight Sparkle, “I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation and we just need to figure out what it is.”

“I propose one of us stay focused on the origin of the past signature while the other three get to work on figuring out what’s going on now. If any more of us show up, we should put them to work in roughly that same ratio. For every three working on the timeline collision, one works on discovering how that energy and that signature were placed there. Also, as I’m sure you’ve all already decided, we should not abuse time travel to bring more of us here to work on the problems at hoof. Two of us know that ends up being far more trouble than it’s worth.”

“Make that three of us.” The purple ponies turned their heads to see that there was a fifth Twilight standing in the frame of the open door.

Comments

Just lovely...

[Shader]

: Uh, hi guys

: Oh boy

Hello comedy!

Really everpony, there's no way this is meant to make sense as anything other than pure time-travel comedy. Let's all just be glad that it's not as insane as the Double Rainbow story that involved cloning.

[Cobalt Brilliance]

One day, I'm going to understand this. One day... I'm super impressed that you can follow it while writing! Or are you just chucking in multiple ponies and hoping you'll manage to untangle it?

[theworstwriter]

8471
Oh but it DOES make sense, this I swear.

8475
There IS a coherent sequence of events going on.

Just think it through slowly and carefully. For now, back up to before Ponyville #2 (and ignore Scootaloo - she's slightly more complicated) and just try placing each scene in plain chronological order. Forget understanding at first, just put them in order so that there are no direct contradictions. NOW read through and try to understand. There are gaps, but you can easily extrapolate what happens during them based on how many of who are busy doing what. At any point you notice the number of a pony has increased, it means that during the gap another one came back.

I SWEAR I'M NOT CRAZY YOU CAN TOTALLY LOGICALLY ASSEMBLE THE TIMELINE ITS TRUE

[Ponyman]

Congrats on the feature, oh worst of writers! When I saw that I was all like

MY BRAIN! IT BURNS!

[RazorRaptor9]

I NEED that graph that explains this.

8508

i don't think even a graph will help us now.

[Squeaky Toy]

I've been drawing a graph to help as I went along, but I either spilled spaghetti on it or it's lost the plot entirely...

[Soulsilver]

Oh thank god I finished. Until you update.

[SouthernCross]

When this is all over you seriously need to make a graph of all this...

[italianshy]

But if they send only one RD to the future, then after a while all the others will go there too. So it's actually pretty simple.

[NimbleBolt]

8511 I agree. I understood what was happening up until the 2nd ponyville showed up but now its just I don't think theres any way to make sense of what is happening now.

[deathtap]

Ha! I knew it! I friggin' knew it!

Is it okay if I gloat about not being totally lost in the mayhem? I guess watching Chaos Head (awesome Anime) helped.