YAHES 2: Season of Chaos
By: Bardic Knowledge
Chapter 6: October 24, The Wizard of Oz
“Okay, so we've experimented with the Time Jaunt spell-” Twilight rolled her eyes. She didn't much care for the nickname I'd given Starswirl's Temporal Transference Spell or whatever its original name was again. “-And we know that if something gets left behind uptime it stays behind.”
Indeed, we'd effectively sacrificed Pinkie, Fluttershy, Spike, and Applejack's ability to have the spell cast on them for experiments on the limitations of the spell. We'd learned that one could leave behind something that had been taken back, and that something from the past could be brought to the present with the snap-back, which invariably happened after a minute.
“We've gone over this already,” said Spike, writing down what was happening. “Why are you going over it again?”
“Nerves, in part,” I replied.
And now it was time to see if it would work across worlds by sending me into my past, a little over a year ago. The spell's target was defined before the casting, rather than by how much power was put into it, though it took extra power to go back further. So I'd charged up a few gems, provided by Rarity, to contain extra mana that Twilight could pull on to complete the spell.
On my person, I had my usual coat and a couple things to leave behind: a pre-written note, a jewel that would be hard for anyone to explain away without my note, and a photograph that had been taken by Spike of the other eight of us standing on the front porch. Hopefully, these would be enough to explain my sudden disappearance.
In addition, I'd memorized a spell like the one I used to copy the Time Jaunt and Dimension Gate spell scroll, but would let me hold the “paste” function until later. I planned to use it to copy the library and maybe the video-and-game collections of my family so I could reproduce them Equestria-side.
We were standing in my living room, hoping that there'd be some kind of resonance effect allowing me to arrive in the same spot as I left, instead of potentially somewhere else in the house (the output point of the spell was pretty much random, but we could hope).
I breathed deep a couple times before I nodded to Twilght, who was standing nearby surrounded by everyone else and with six gems floating around her. It was an odd coincidence, but each gem was not only a different colour, but also the colours of the Elements of Chrono Cross: Red, Yellow, Blue, Green, Black, and White. This fact is more amusing to me now than it was back when it happened.
Twilight charged up her horn and shot the spell at me, the six gems adding their power to the spell. I felt an odd warmth coming from my pocket and then everything seemed to stretch and shrink and twist and expand at the same time.
Everything went black.
I blinked a few times, then felt a shudder pass through me with a single all-encompassing sound:
The tick of a clock.
Then, suddenly, I was back where I had been standing, gasping for breath. And looking upon my sleeping self.
I knew I had to get to work fast, I had only a minute after all. So I grabbed the items to be left and dropped them on the coffee table, an octagonal affair that dad built after the black one I had in my version of the house had fallen apart. I then grabbed my real computer, coiled up the power cable, and put it in my pocket.
Then I cast the Dimension Gate spell on my past self. It drained me pretty bad, about half my magic in one go, but I saw myself seem to slide into the couch, a light shimmer like heat on asphalt signifying where the point of exit was for a half a second after I vanished before vanishing itself.
Loop complete.
With fifteen seconds left (casting the spell took time), I stretched my magic as far as it could reach and copied every book, tape (video and audio), CD, record, DVD, and game cartridge in the house. Immediately, a headache began to form right at the centre of my head.
Time was up, electricity sparking down my arms. I looked to where I had been sitting and gasped in shock. My pocket watch, the one Time Turner had made for me, was with the other three items I'd brought to leave behind. I had no idea how it got there from my pocket, but it was shining brightly in the sun, and I was just reaching for it when the world began to distort again.
I hadn't heard anything when I left Equestria, but moments before I vanished from Earth, I heard a telltale sound.
The “VWORP” of a TARDIS engine.
Then I was in blackness again.
I floated there for another couple blinks before being ejected into my house in Equestria, no tick of a clock accompanying me. As the others gathered around to check on me, for the previous tests hadn't caused such a violent snap-back, I felt the headache worsen. It spread to the front of my head, then the temples, and I gripped at my skull. I couldn't focus, the pain feeling like my skull was splitting.
“Something-” I tried to choke out. “In head-” I grabbed the wall and climbed to my feet. “Pain!”
to the basement
I wasn't sure where the thought came from, but I jumped over the railing to the basement stairs. Everyone upstairs shouted in shock and stared after me.
workshop
I crashed into a wall and nearly tripped on the game room curtains as I moved to the workshop, wrenching open the door, then slamming it behind me.
workshop of the mind
Trusting my instincts, the only explanation I had for the clear-but-quiet voice, I saturated the workshop with my magic.
What had been full of unused carpentry equipment and empty shelves shimmered and transformed, stretching into a new shape.
Watt Auditorium. No. My mindscape.
The headache remained, but had lessened. I could think properly again. Observe better.
It looked like liquid night was pouring from backstage. It was barely being held in check by my mental constructs, but they had been losing ground.
I made to approach Luxord, to ask him what was happening (he was my muse and logic centre, after all), when a lion's paw landed on my shoulder.
“Let him concentrate,” said a horribly familiar voice. “They're doing their best to keep all that information from overloading your brain.”
I turned my head slowly to left, slightly dreading what I knew I was going to see. Discord. Still in my head.
He glanced back at me from the large screen that had just broadcast my thoughts. It was mostly static, but words still formed when they entered my head.
“Don't worry,” he said, softly, “I'm not the real deal. He's completely left the mind. I'm your newest mental construct, representing your magic and your instinct. I look like him, because you still think of your magic as being of him.”
“You were the one who brought me in here,” I panted. A wave of starry night surged against Luxord's cards, shoving him, Yin, Yang, and a still-drowsy Ember back a few steps.
“You need to be in your mindscape to properly fix this,” he responded. “I can give you nudges, guide you when you can't think of what to do, but its up to you on how to ultimately go forward.”
“What happens if I can't figure this out?”
“How should I know? I'm just as in the dark as you.” He looked to the stage. “But judging by what we're seeing... Catatonia as who you are gets washed away by what you know. You, and everything that makes us you, consumed by too much data.”
“Johnny Mnemonic.”
The stars of knowledge surged again, as one scene of the old movie attempted to make itself known... How did I know that was what just happened?
“It's your mind!” shouted Luxord. “Everything in here is you! We just need more- ngh!” The information surged again.
“I've always strived to keep an open mind,” I said. Why am I monologuing? “But maybe this time, I just need to think bigger.” With an echo in my voice, I spread my hand towards the stage.
There was an almost imperceptible swelling, things stretching, and the waves of liquid space began to calm.
“Welcome to my brain,” I intoned, my magic surrounding myself and the mindscape. “It's Bigger On The Inside.”
The next thing I knew, I was laying outside the workshop, surrounded by everyone else, exceptionally dizzy and light headed.
“Joe!” cried Trixie, putting my head in her human lap. “What happened? We couldn't get the door open!”
“320 gigs of data in an 80 gig skull,” I replied blearily. “I had to make room.”
Twilight gasped this time, hoof over her mouth. “Then, you... What did you lose?” she whispered at the end.
“Nothin'.” I smiled with half my face; the other half felt kind of numb. “Made it bigger. My head, my rules.”
Pinkie jiggled the handle of the workshop door. “Still won't open,” she said, confused.
“Not a normal door, now. Leads into my mind,” I yawned. “Only opens by my hand...” I fell asleep there. Afterwards, Trixie apparently carried me up to bed. I awoke hours later to her cuddling me in her sleep. I hugged her back and lazily created a kage bunshin to go back to the mindscape.
I needed to talk to my new tenant.
---
The worst part about being a shadow clone, was that, at the back of my mind, I knew I wasn't the original.
Regardless, everything else about me was exactly the same as the original lying in bed right now, which meant that I could, in fact, do what I needed me to and access the Mind Workscape (name to be revised).
I opened the door and stepped through. The place looked exactly the same as when the original left it, though it felt odd due to the stretchyness of the mind expansion thing. It took just as long to walk across the mental auditorium as the real thing, but it felt larger than it looked.
I was greeted at the stage by the facets of personality.
“So,” I started. “You're not him.” I directed this at the Discord facsimile.
“That's what I said, little shadow,” he said, leaning on the air.
“And how do I know that's the truth?”
“Any one of us could tell you,” answered Luxord, “but I rather doubt you would believe he didn't just warp our perceptions.”
“It is a possibility,” I agreed.
“Oh, I know,” “Not”-Discord said. “This is a thing the big man changed after the real deal was in here.” He approached the bookshelf and pulled out a book at random. He showed us all the cover of it, which was emblazoned with the Yin half of the Taijitu.
“Right, to keep someone from reading my memories without permission,” I nodded. That fact alone is something a shard of Discord would know if he'd been in here long enough. Each of the books was now adorned with one of four symbols, and the contents randomized and written on top of itself for as long as the symbol was there, making a book unreadable.
“Yang, would you mind terribly if I read this?” he asked, holding the book out to light side. Yang nodded and walked over, placing his hand, and his mark on the book. The completed Taijitu then faded out, and “Not”-Discord opened the book to reveal the memory within. It was me (well, the original), laying on the living room couch on Earth, attempting to make my own book on tape for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
“Well, that does somewhat assure me,” I said. “But you could have learned about that from watching the screen over there.” I gestured to the TV Wall, where the original's content thoughts of being curled up in bed with someone he loved were being displayed.
Not-Discord pouted before closing the book and placing it back on the shelf. “I know, what if I were to ramp up our instincts a little. Get the blood flowing?” He grinned in a mildly malicious manner.
“You try that,” I growled. “And regardless of whether or not you're part of my mind, I'll come in here and discorporate you myself.”
Not-Discord held up his hands in surrender and in the spirit of “we've got a badass over here.” “Oh, very well. Then I have one last thing to try.” Not-Discord stood upon the stage, slightly displacing Yin, and placed his talon over his heart while raising his paw. “I solemnly swear on my Self, that I am in no way part or whole of the real Discord, and should I be lying, I promise to eject myself from this mindscape forthwith and forevermore.”
And nothing happened. I knew exactly why, too:
“Kami can't break their word,” Instinct and I said together, and I smiled.
“Now that that business is out of the way,” said Luxord. “I have an observation the, ah, overmind might be interested in.” I merely quirked an eyebrow in response. “The five colours are complete.”
I looked at the five facets of my Self. “Well, I guess we're mostly in balance, then,” I commented.
“Mostly,” Luxord nodded. “But if we want to truly be in balance, we can't let Ember sleep all the time. Even the half-drowsy state it lives in now isn't quite enough.”
“I'm passing it along, but I doubt I'm going to be doing much in that direction any time soon.”
“With how long we've been stoic,” murmured Yin, “it would be quite difficult to be anything else.”
“Old habits and all that!” boasted Yang.
“righ',” sleepily muttered Ember, fighting off a yawn. "you do tha'."
“...You're all far more animated and vocal than you were when Discord brought me in here for the first real visit,” I said.
“It's the magic,” explained Instinct. “It's taken how you view yourself and enhanced it along those lines. That's part of why I look like Discord, remember?”
“Because, in my heart, I haven't accepted that the magic is actually mine.” I nodded, then paused. “You guys aren't going to talk to me while I'm not in here, are you?”
“rarely,” said Ember.
“For the most part, we'll keep being simple facets of the greater Joe Glenn McCord,” agreed Luxord. “But when you need to think harder, or feel more-”
“-Or trust your instincts,” quipped Instinct.
“Quite – then we'll speak up. But only while you need us.”
“Sounds good. However, there's another curious thing on the agenda. I need the memory of when I visited Earth earlier today.” I gestured to the Book Wall and a tome slid out and flew into my hand. This one had a flaming heart on it. “Luxord, would you mind unlocking this?”
“Not a problem at all.” He tossed a card onto the cover, and the Nobody Crest merged with the heart into Master Eraqus' symbol before fading out. Instead of opening the book, I slid it into a receptacle on the TV Wall.
“Now, I need to see the moment when I put the items to be left onto the table in slow motion.” The wall obliged. There was the jewel, the note, and the picture, and then, just as I went to turn towards my sleeping self, I felt my hand brush against my side as I unclipped my pocket watch and placed it on the table beside them, releasing the chain just in time for me to put my hand on the past self and start casting. “Pause.”
I turned to the mindscape. “Can anyone tell me why we did that?”
Instinct nodded, “It was a mild geas. A suggestion implanted in our mind, much like the one that made us wind the watch every night at midnight without thinking about it.”
“Which means,” added Luxord, “that whoever commissioned the watch wanted it left there.”
“And we already have a theory on that,” I concluded. “Fast forward to the moment the Time Jaunt started wearing off.”
The image moved forward, the quiet of the empty house suddenly being split by the sound of an incoming TARDIS, even as the image was starting to fragment like digital TV due to the information overload that was just starting.
“A TARDIS,” murmured Yin.
“Just like the day we got the watch!” exclaimed Yang.
“Precisely,” said Luxord. “We might not be a Time Lord, but a Time Lord wanted to manipulate us with that watch. Which begs the questions:
“Why? And to what end?”