An Alternate Universe Where Everything Is Moved Slightly to the Left
This story begins as many, many others have. With an alicorn named Twilight Sparkle.
Over the course of her life, Twilight has had a great deal many things happen to her, many good, some bad. She has made some wonderful friends, saved the world a couple of times, read a lot of books, and has just recently come into possession of a giant crystal tree castle to call her very own, though she very much preferred the last place she lived.
It had taken some getting used to, her new castle. Though she had grown up navigating the halls of Canterlot Palace with only little difficulty, this castle seemed to actively resist her trying to learn its layout.
It had been almost a year now she had been living in this castle and it had taken at least eight months before she finally felt confident she understood its design and the locations of each room.
The ground floor was the easiest to learn, as there were only four major rooms to it. The great hall, the throne room, the kitchens, and a sort of sitting room, as well as a foyer and two sets of staircases, one in the front and one in the back.
It was the upper floors that were the trouble. There were thirty separate bedrooms of varying sizes, as well as their accompanying solars, a rather large library, guard barracks, three study rooms, several boudoirs and cabinets, twenty different bathrooms, servant quarters, nineteen balconies, a sunroom, four kitchenettes, countless closets, cupboards, and storage areas, an infirmary, a dovecote and aerie, more sitting rooms, seventeen fireplaces, and about another twenty-odd rooms that Twilight didn’t even know existed, let alone want to remember the names of.
The Tree of Harmony obviously hadn’t gotten an update about modern architectural standards and practices for a long time. More than half of the rooms were practically useless in this day and age. Solars hadn’t been in style for hundreds of years, and who needed that many fireplaces anyways?
Twilight certainly did not. As far as she was concerned, most of the rooms in her castle would go unused. As it was, once she picked out her bedroom on the second floor, she closed off the other four floors above her and hadn’t gone up any further since.
Only two other bedrooms were ever in any use, Spike’s, and now Starlight Glimmer’s.
And so it was the three of them, all alone, in an otherwise completely empty castle that was much too big for them.
Much too frequently now, Twilight longed for the days when she didn’t get winded walking all the way down the hall to get to the bathroom from her bedroom. In fact, she had once estimated that living in this castle added an average of 3.7 miles to the distance she walked every day, just from the sheer largeness of every single room and hallway.
It was hard to complain though, when said castle literally sprung out of the ground in a completely unprecedented magical event. It seemed destiny and fate wanted her to live in such a place, so who was she to argue?
Though, as it is wont to do, bureaucracy has no bearing for such trivialities as destiny and fate. The castle did clash something fierce with the rest of the rustic stylings of Ponyville, and, after all the hubbub from the Tirek incident settled down, the zoning committee and local historic preservation society had come knocking on her door almost immediately to yell at her for not submitting the appropriate paperwork with town hall before erecting a multi-level, multi-use, shared residence-commercial building on the outskirts of town proper.
It had taken two weeks and one of the Crown’s personal lawyers to sort that mess out. It turns out there is no precedent set for large magical structures appearing out of thin air.
However, if any were to spring up at some point in the future, any court proceedings or legal battle that may happen could easily look to ‘Sparkle v. Ponyville’ for the precedent on how to rule.
She had made it her home, though. It may have taken some time, and a little help from her friends, but she finally felt comfortable in her new castle. She had rearranged all the furniture in every room at least two or three times by now, so that it meshed well with her own particular sensibilities, and had filled the large empty halls with the exact same decorations, objects, and trinkets that she had had for the past twenty years, as she did not like change very much.
The end result was a place that she could feel at home in. And she was happy.
That's why, with settling in firmly crossed off of her list, Twilight Sparkle set her sights on her next goal, something that had bugged her since the time she first discovered it. The very fact her castle existed, or any sort of magical properties it may possess held no interest for her, as it was quickly overshadowed by this one thing in particular.
The most mysterious part of her castle, of course, would be the Cutie Map, a sort of map-table hybrid that she still did not fully understand. How does it know when there is a friendship emergency halfway across the country, or even on the other side of the ocean? How did it decide who to send to try and fix it?
Twilight did not know, and Twilight did not like not knowing things (for reference, ask her parents, who were shocked when they discovered she understood both the details of how babies were made and the entire periodic table, all at age seven).
It was that reason she had been spending quite a lot of time studying the thing. She had been hoping to discover just what made it tick.
But to no avail.
It had been many months now since she began. She had studied it when it sent Applejack and Rarity to Manehatten, Rarity and Pinkie Pie to Canterlot, Applejack and Fluttershy to Las Pegasus, and Spike had kept tabs on it during the times it sent her away someplace.
And nothing of any interest had been turned up. Nothing that explained how or why it worked like it did. It never reacted to any spells—and she had tried a plethora—and it did not react to physical violence, such as the few times she had kicked it out of frustration.
Starlight Glimmer had helped, of course. She had been the one to almost destroy the entire world with it, so she was just as much an expert on it as Twilight herself was, that is to say, not very much at all.
And so, Twilight’s frustration with the Cutie Map grew with every failed experiment. She did not understand why it proved to be so elusive, but she kept a stiff upper lip and kept at it regardless.
Truth be told, strange map-tables that keep tabs on the entire world do not like being tampered with very much. Especially strange map-tables that are a part of a magical friendship castle that was birthed from a mystical and harmonious tree that seemed to have sway over reality itself.
And doubly so for this strange map-table. This one in particular had a short temper and didn’t care for Twilight’s incessant experiments on it.
There was another strange map-table lost somewhere deep in the deserts of Saddle Arabia that was feeling rather lonely and would’ve loved somepony such as Twilight to come along and interact with it.
This, of course, was unknown to Twilight Sparkle. Only one other pony knew of its existence, and he was currently trapped outside of both time and reality itself.
And so, she continued studying her Cutie Map with the same enthusiasm and aplomb she always approached intense research with.
This, ultimately, was her mistake.
As such, as many others before it have, this story involves a terrible magical accident. This one was not completely Twilight’s fault, though she certainly shares the blame. She could not know the Cutie Map was as cross with her as it was.
And so, a chain of events began that, little did she know, would end with her in another dimension.
Presently, the Cutie Map flared to life, displaying Fluttershy’s and Pinkie Pie’s cutie marks above the town of Appleloosa. There was a friendship problem of some sort there. Maybe more racial tensions between the ponies and the buffalos.
Twilight perked up at this welcome change and moved closer to the table to inspect it more intently. As she had done many times before, she first cast a detection spell over the table, so that she could record the magical energy fields it was radiating for later study.
A clipboard and quill at the ready, she attached several measuring devices to the map-table, all of which immediately began spitting out data at a fast rate. One even began beeping rapidly, which was undoubtedly a good thing.
She allowed herself a small smile and continued monitoring the readouts, all sorts of thoughts and theories flying around her head.
And that was when everything went wrong, as these things tend to do.
For no discernable reason, there was an intense burst of magical energy from the Cutie Map that caused quite a few of Twilight’s machines to short-circuit and fry.
In an instant, a flash, and a bang, a swirling vortex she was intimately familiar with appeared above her.
A portal to an alternative timeline.
Her eyes widened in surprise, the beginnings of a counterspell surging to the tip of her horn, ready to try and close it. She had prepared for this very thing, after her battle against Starlight Glimmer, just in case.
But, alas, she was not fast enough.
The vortex sucked her into its maw, whisking her away.
And Twilight Sparkle left this universe, bound for another, alternate one.
And when she rematerialized, she appeared in the same room, in the same castle, in the same town, in the same country, only slightly to the left of where she had just been.
She blinked.
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