“Something’s wrong!”
Lyra’s head snapped up. Ditzy had fallen to the floor and was clutching her skull in her hooves, her eyes bulging out. Dezzy was standing over her.
“Grandma? Grandma, what’s wrong?”
Lyra ran forward; she could hear Winter Bell’s hoofsteps on the tile following behind her. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know!” Dezzy said. “She was fine just a second a go! Grandma, what’s wrong? Ditzy!?”
Ditzy squeezed her eyes shut. “Something’s… not right,” she said, hissing through clenched teeth. “Something’s coming through! This wasn’t supposed to—agh!It’s tangling with the exit tunnel!”
“It’s what?” Dezzy said. “That doesn’t make any sense!”
A bang sounded, like a gunshot, just a few feet away. Lyra looked up.
A ball of lightning, the same as when Dezzy had appeared, had appeared in the middle of the floor—except this one was no perfect sphere. It was twisted, warped, and looking less and less stable by the second as it expanded. Bolts of electricity lashed out from it, arcing against the floor and the counter and leaving ugly black marks in their path.
Lyra grabbed Winter Bell and pulled her back, just as one of the bolts came dangerously close to her fetlocks, and then began backing away from the ball herself. “Dezzy, I hope you can fix this, ‘cause I don’t want to have to explain to Bon Bon why her shop is filled with lightening!”
“Dezzy! Dezzy, can you hear me?”
Dezzy’s head shot up. “Soo? That you?”
The voice was coming from the ball of lightning, now half a meter in diameter.
“Dezzy, thank Celestia! Something’s gone wrong!”
“I can see that!” Dezzy shouted. “What’s happening?”
“I don’t know!” the voice said. “Everything was holding stable until—”
“There’s—there’s something else, interfering.” It was Ditzy, climbing to her hooves, her face twisted in pain. “You need to reroute the... exit tunnel.”
“Did you hear that, Soo?” Dezzy shouted. “Grandma says we need to reroute the exit tunnel! And you’d better do it fast! Whatever this is, it’s hurting her!”
“Reroute the… Of course! On it!”
The ball was at least a meter wide, now, and Lyra had just run out of space to back up into as her back legs hit the front of the counter. “Hurry!” she yelled.
Something popped, and from within the ball came an object, spinning through the air and headed straight for Lyra’s head. Lighting her horn, she caught the thing in her magic just inches away from her forehead.
“And… there!” the voice from behind the ball announced. “Recalibrated for recall!”
A loud thud echoed through the storefront, and at once the raging surface of the ball began to calm.
“It worked!” Dezzy said. “It’s stabilizing!”
“That’s great,” the voice replied, “but it’s not going to stay open for much longer! Get back here, quick!”
“You got it!” Dezzy said. She turned around and waved to Lyra. “It was nice meeting you! Sorry about your shop! Bye, grandma!”
And with that, she ran forward and leapt into the sphere, disappearing as she entered its electrical expanse. The ball itself began to shrink until it, too, vanished, leaving behind no trace of its presence save for the scorch marks along the floor and the imprint it had left seared into Lyra’s vision.
“Is… is it over?” Winter Bell asked, peeking out from behind Lyra. Lyra blinked a few times, then cast her attention to Ditzy Doo. The mare was standing easily, now, with none of the earlier pain present in her face. Her mane was standing on end, splayed in all directions. She let out a long breath.
“Ditzy?” Lyra said. “Are you alright?”
“I am now,” Ditzy replied. “That was… not fun.”
Ditzy shook her head back and forth, as if to clear it. “Brrbrrbrrbrr… Really not fun.”
“It didn’t look like it!” Winter Bell said. “What happened?”
“Something else tried to come in through the timestream while Dezy’s exit was forming,” Ditzy said. “They attracted to each other and got tangled—speaking of which…”
Ditzy glanced around. The she blinked. “My eyes aren’t working right. I think that tangle might have short-circuited my future sight! So that’s why I couldn’t see it coming!”
Winter Bell cocked her head to the side. “Short-wha-ted?”
“Broke it, temporarily I hope… and my normal vision’s gone all fuzzy, too,” Ditzy said. She sighed. “Can either of you see anything? Something should have been spat out when Sooner untangled the two tunnels, and I want to know what it was.”
“Oh,” Lyra said. “You mean this?”
She held up the object she had caught with her telekinesis, up until now forgotten about amidst more pressing matters. For the first time, she got a good look at it.
It was a scroll, parchment by the looks of it, and tied shut with twine.
Lyra relayed this information to Ditzy, who was blinking furiously in her direction.
“That’s weird,” she said, frowning. “Does it say anything?”
Lyra shrugged and undid the twine. There was indeed writing on the inside, written in an elegant yet rushed-looking script.
“Dearest Ditzy Doo,” Lyra read. “I require your assistance with a matter most urgent. I fear you may be my last and final hope of escaping this eternal nightmare. This scroll will return to the past precisely one minute after it arrives; I hope to whatever higher powers be out there that you will accompany it. Reagrds—”
Lyra didn’t get to finish the letter, because it had just begun to glow.
“Uh, Ditzy—”
Ditzy’s eyes widened. “One minute after—Lyra! Drop the—”
But it was too late, for as Lyra watched, the scroll flashed, and suddenly she was falling down, left, right, up, all at the same time. It was as if something had taken hold of her stomach and was pulling her in every direction at unfathomable speeds, all at once. And yet, at the same time, it was as if she wasn’t moving at all, and it was everything else that had changed.
The candy shop became a streak of colour, extending into infinity, separating into reds, greens, blues, and a dozen other hues Lyra couldn’t put names to. Other shapes began to mix into them, like foreign brushed running through wet paint, an endless expanse of colour and noise and light and—
With a thud, Lyra landed on a hard, cold floor.
She groaned. Her head was spinning, her ears were ringing, and her stomach was doing flips. She blinked until her vision came into focus.
She was lying on stone of some sort, she could see that much, grey and rough against her coat. There was a wall in front of her, also stone, and between her and it stood an oaken bookcase, packed to bursting. She could see more of them out of the sides of her vision.
Letting out another groan, she began to get her hooves under her, one leg at a time, standing up slowly so she wouldn’t get any more nauseous than she already was. The ringing in her ears was starting to fade, she noticed. She could tell someone was speaking; she focused on that.
“—you’ve gotten the wrong mare! Useless—should not have resorted to such heavy-hoofed methods, even if the situation required them…”
When Lyra was quite sure she wasn’t going to fall down if she moved, she began to turn around.
“What will you do now? You can’t send out another scroll, you haven’t the materials… ah, but they’ll be back tomorrow, along with everything else!”
Lyra’s eyes, still looking at the floor, came to a pair of hooves. She tilted her head up to look at their owner—and her mouth dropped open.
“Ah, yes, a-hem… hello? Can you hear me?”
The pony before her stood about a head taller than her on long, light-blue legs. Despite this, his beard, white and flowing, reached easily to the floor and then some. Atop his head sat a hat, wide-brimmed and rimmed with bells.
Lyra recognized him immediately. Impossible as it was, it could be nopony else.
And that was how Lyra Heartstrings vomited all over the robes of Starswirl the Bearded.