Talc
Equestria is a wonderful place to live, with endless opportunities to explore and learn new things. Volcanic beaches, deserts, windswept plains, alps both recent and ancient, upturned sea bottoms and glacier-dragged mountaintops.
Equestria has a’a,
Flint, zinc, ar-KOSE’, la-VA’.
Mica, mohite, agate, albite,
Pumice, pyrite, jasper, wehrlite,
Emery, mercury, amber, gran-ITE’,
Blueschist, whiteschist, nephrite, halite,
A’a, flint, zinc, la-VA’.
Blueschist, whiteschist, mica, mohite,
Amber, jasper, agate, wehrlite,
Nephrite, halite, pumice, pyrite,
A’a!
As soon as Starlight had started reading the poem, Maud joined in. She started the list of rocks slowly, but then picked up her tempo, making the second half sound like some kind of dark magic chant. She also deliberately mispronounced the names of a few of the rocks to make the poem scan better, such as “grun-ITE” instead of “GRAN-ut” for granite.
“It was my first experiment with prose,” Maud said afterward, “so I threw a poem in there to raise my confidence.”
She sat there silently as Starlight resumed reading the story aloud.
In fact, there was only one thing wrong with Equestria in the mind of young Maud: ponies. Ponies that had dumb reasons for not wanting you to examine their minerals at any or all hours, like “personal property” or “privacy”. Ponies that asked questions that didn’t have good answers, like “why aren’t you playing with the other ponies your age?” or “why don’t you ever laugh?”
She really didn’t like hearing that last question.
Maud lived on a rock farm, which was the best place imaginable. Even better, she had a family that respected rocks, even if she knew they didn’t love them like she loved them. They were ponies too, and even they would sometimes give her a heart-breaking look when she said or did something that was not right for ponies not named Maud. But they always forgave her. Every day, if she was lucky, Maud spent her day working with rocks, and if she was good and efficient, she then got free time that she could spend working with even more rocks—and staying away from her family so she didn’t screw up around them. If she wasn’t lucky, then her family took her into town and she had to deal with even more ponies. Maud tried to prepare herself for these days when she knew that they were going to happen, going up to the attic to roleplay with her rock friends. She never managed to guess in these sessions what particular indignity the town ponies would inflict upon her. Not once.
Starlight gave Maud a pitying look.
Maud gave her an empty, soul-sucking stare until she stopped.
After a long time of dreading these town days, life for young Maud settled into a comfortable pattern. She would wake up, rotate the rocks in the south field alongside her family, and spend the hours after an early supper exploring random corners of the family gem mine.
And day after day, the members of her family became more predictable and less scary. It was almost like she knew what they were going to say before they said it.
Gradually a truth dawned upon her, a truth she had been doing her best to deny: she had been reliving the same Tuesday for more than a month. The fact of the matter was, living the same day over and over again meant that all of the things that made ponies inexplicable to Maud were fading away. If she could just live the same day for a year or two, she might finally completely understand her family. And if she could live the same day for a decade or two, then she could even explore the town, say the things that would make the town ponies hate her forever—only they’d forget the very next day and she could try saying something else, and something else, until she finally found the one thing to say that would make them stop. And she’d keep that knowledge ready for when time started up again.
But time didn’t start up again. The same Tuesday keep looping and looping. And Maud saw no sign that anypony had realized what was happening, that anypony in the whole world had realized what was happening…except for her.
“One question: why is it the whole day that is looping? Twilight only took a few hours at most before she triggered the loop each time.”
“I have a hoof-waving explanation later in the story, but basically, I found it too hard to plot everything out if the loop kept happening at moments that my main character couldn’t predict. So imagine that each day starts normal, a few hours go by until just before Rainbow Dash’s race, and then you suddenly appear out of a portal. Twilight appears a few minutes later, you sabotage the race, Twilight disappears through a portal, you sit around until Twilight is done in the alternate future, and then you disappear into a portal. And that is followed by hours of nothing unusual happening until midnight, when the day resets.”
“Alright,” said Starlight. She had encountered much worse plot-holes in Rainbow Dash’s stories.
For a brief moment, Maud wondered if it was actually a bad thing if Wednesday never came. After all, Wednesday would be one day closer to the world-ending cataclysm that the Big Book in the family room told her about. On another hoof, if time never went forward again, then Maud would never grow up. She’d never be able to get her rocktorate. She’d never be able to leave the rock farm and pursue her destiny. And although she’d never understand ponies, at least they’d stop treating her like she was a moron just because she was still a filly.
So somepony needed to do something heroic.
Maud considered herself the last pony in Equestria to be destined to be a hero. Heroism involved interacting with ponies, after all. Surely if something weird was going on with Time, then the Princess would know and would fly to wherever to fix it. Or maybe the day would be saved by that other, pinker princess that the Pies had heard vague rumors about.
And even if Maud was the only pony who knew that Time was broken, what could she do about it? She knew nothing about the world outside the farm and the town. She didn’t know much about the inhabitants of the town, but the only unicorn was a medic, and didn’t seem to be the mad scientist type, assuming a mad scientist was responsible for the infinite string of Tuesdays.
And if the problem didn’t come from the town, where would she go to fix things? And how could she do it in less than twenty-four hours? Maud wasn’t sure where she picked up the rules of time loops, but one of them stated that every midnight she would be returned to the place she spent her first midnight, namely, her bed.
Maud was contemplating all this in the mine one night when she fell asleep with Boulder.
When she woke up, she was still in the mine, and she still had Boulder. And when she returned home in the morning, everypony wanted to know why she had snuck out of the house in the middle of the night, since they saw her going to bed on Monday night.
Maud saw this as a pretty clear sign.