//------------------------------// // Fluorite // Story: An Eternity of Rocks // by McPoodle //------------------------------// Fluorite The next morning, Maud stepped off of the porch and looked in the direction that Pinkamena had failed to get her cutie mark from. She saw Cloudsdale, and face-hoofed. Of course Cloudsdale would be involved. Tuesday was the first time that the floating city had been this close in at least five or six years. But all the same, Maud knew of no way that a pegasus would be able to manipulate Time. Maybe if one of them flew so fast that she broke the Time Barrier? Assuming of course that such a thing existed. She spent the day doing her chores with one eye on the cloud city. The city was close enough that she could see individual pegasi flying around—they were little more than specks. As she watched, there was a flash of white light at one end of the city—rather hard to make out, against the bright white of Cloudsdale as a whole—and a smaller than normal speck fell slowly out of the sky, hitting the ground with a puff of dust. Maud had read that pegasi were incredibly resilient to falls—something about their internal magic working even when unconscious to slow their speed far below terminal velocity. That and they let themselves get hit by lightning for fun. So it was unlikely that the falling pegasus had suffered more than a few quickly-healed broken bones from that fall. But she was also a potential source of information. “‘She’?” Starlight asked with a teasing smile, having a strong suspicion just who that falling pegasus actually was. Not that she actually ever did that to Rainbow Dash—the one time she shot the filly directly, it was over a cloudbank. But this was an alternate reality with hundreds of loops. Starlight suspected that under the circumstances, the old her might have lost her temper enough to leave her to fall all the way to the ground. But she probably would have cast a feather-fall on Rainbow as well. “‘She’ in the generic gender sense,” Maud explained. Then she grabbed the manuscript and a colored pencil and made a correction or two. But she (or he) was also a potential source of information. She ran over to her parents. “Father, I saw a pony fall out of Cloudsdale and land just within our boundaries. May I see to her this fallen pegasus?” Just like last night, Igneous glared down at her, certain that something in Maud’s statement was wrong, other than the fact that it was Maud running towards a pony she didn’t know. The particular lie in this case was the location of the body—it was in fact in Peach Cobbler’s farm, and normally, it would be Peach Cobbler’s responsibility to see to any pegasi that fell onto her farm, with the Pies only getting involved if Peach Cobbler specifically requested their assistance. Maud was potentially dragging her family into a whole heap of trouble by poking her muzzle where it didn’t belong… A heap that would magically disappear at the stroke of midnight. Not for the first time did Maud ask herself if fixing Time was really the right thing to do. “You may go,” Igneous said slowly. Maud had dashed off before hearing the third word—he had said yes, as she knew he would. A month of receiving the exact same lecture every time she stayed too long in the mines had taught her that her father’s preferred method of discipline would be to give any daughter thinking of crossing him enough rope to hogtie herself in a knot of lies too tight to ever escape from. And just like the problem with Peach Cobbler, it would all reset at… Nope, Maud thought to herself, not going to keep tempting myself with the joys of Infinite Tuesday. After a solid half-hour of running, she finally arrived at the impact point. Peach Cobbler was there, looking indignantly at the injured pegasus filly, as if it were her own fault for falling out of the sky and interrupting her harvest. A pegasus medic was beside her, binding her sky blue limbs in splints and bandages. “Is…she OK?” Maud asked, rapidly getting her wind back. She noticed that the filly had a mane with every color of the rainbow in it. She was fairly certain that it was a dye job. “What’s it to you, Maud Pie?” Peach Cobbler demanded. “I’m just fine!” the filly declared in a scratchy voice. “I wish somepony would hurry up and get me back to class before I get in trouble.” “You’re not going anywhere until that ambulance shows up to take you to Cloudsdale Central Hospital safely,” the medic insisted. The filly groaned. “And I was this close to winning!” “Winning what?” Maud asked. She had to force herself to do this. Her natural instinct when a conversation was going on was to disappear into the surrounding limestone until she thought she had enough information to fake being a normal pony. “The Race for Fluttershy’s…not that there was a race. Of course there wasn’t a race, because starting another unauthorized race would get me suspended. So we were just…talking about a race. Yeah! Talking, about a theoretical race. That I was totally going to win before that unicorn zapped me!” Ah, a unicorn, thought Maud. Finally, a lead. And that’s when Peach Cobbler got in her face. “I got this situation well in hand, Pie,” she said, shoving her barrel against Maud’s. “What are you really here for? Are you a spy for the Orange Conglomerate?” “I just saw this filly fall and thought I’d lend a hoof,” said Maud. “And…?” Peach demanded. Maud looked away. “And maybe I thought I could make an extra bit or two if I got the filly’s story and sold it to the Rockville Gazette.” “Ha, I knew it!” Peach declared. “And I ought to kick myself—this is just the kind of fluff story that Extra Opinion would pay top-bit for. If it wasn’t for the fact that my writing skills are nil, I’d boot you from my farm so I could do the same thing myself!” Maud had come up with the story during her cross-country run. And as Peach wasn’t family, she had no possible way to know that Maud wasn’t lying. Maud had overheard a town pony giving a reason for her extraordinary ability to get away with bald-faced whoppers: “lack of emotional affect” it was called, or something like that. “Hey,” the filly spoke up, “you totally have my permission to interview me. I’ve never been in an earth pony newspaper before—this will be sweet!” The medic pony sat back and crossed her hooves. “Well, you can talk to her until that ambulance arrives, but as soon as it does, your interview is over. And if you get her excited enough to mess with my dressings, then you don’t have to wait for Miss Cobbler here to lose her temper, because I’ll carry you off of her farm myself!” “Of course,” Maud said with a curtsy. She pulled out her geology notebook and pencil, and sat down beside the gurney the filly was by now bound to. “Why don’t you start with your name?” And with that the filly, whose name was Rainbow Dash, exploded. Not in a literal sense, but verbally. In ten minutes, Maud heard more words from this pegasus than she had heard from all members of her family combined over the course of her entire life. She tried her best to keep notes of the important points, without moving her pencil fast enough to set it aflame. (She hadn’t actually set her notebook on fire from writing too fast, but she had heard a cutie mark story that involved just such a feat, so she knew to be careful.) So in between hearing the intricate details of young Rainbow Dash’s entire life story, including over a dozen extremely distinct impersonations of the various actors involved—the one for the medic at least was 100% accurate—Maud learned the following: Rainbow Dash was gifted with an eidetic memory, at least when she was flying. Rainbow Dash spent at least 90% of her life flying. She wanted to be a Wonderbolt when she grew up. Actually, “something something THE WONDERBOLTS!” was also Point #0, Point #1.5, and every other Point #N.5. She had a best friend named Fluttershy, also a pegasus filly, and the “hypothetical” race she obviously organized was done to defend her honor after being called on her poor flying skills. The race was interrupted by a levitating pink-and-purple unicorn who had quite deliberately blasted her with a paralysis spell in the middle of an argument with a light-purple-and-blue pegasus. Well, maybe the pegasus was an alicorn. Except that would be impossible, because she was purple, and the only known alicorns are white and pink. So that horn had to be a fake. Rainbow Dash had picked up enough of the argument between the two to identify the unicorn as “Starlight” and the pegasus-maybe-alicorn as “Twilight”. Twilight had a familiar, in the form of a compact snarky dragon that rode on her back. Rainbow hadn’t caught the name of the dragon. As she was falling, Starlight had cast another spell on her. (The medic broke in at this point to state that the second spell was almost certainly Feather Fall. Too bad it wore off halfway to the ground.) Starlight winced. Yup, she thought, that sounds exactly like something the old me would do without thinking it through. Now it was possible, Maud reflected as she reviewed her notes, that the time loops were caused by some other unicorn or alicorn in Cloudsdale, but Maud considered this extremely unlikely. Also, it seemed certain that this fight was confined to Cloudsdale. The reason for this was if the pair had ever fought somewhere else, then Pinkamena would have gotten her cutie mark, and as obtuse as Maud often was about pony emotions, she was fairly confident that she would notice one of her sisters getting her cutie mark, even if it only happened once in a month of Tuesdays. As she was running these conclusions through her head, the pegasus ambulance finally arrived. “Did you get all that?” Rainbow Dash pleaded as she was being loaded in. “Pretty sure,” she said. “Well you got the name right at least? Rainbow Dash, two words? Attending the Cloudsdale Elite Summer Flight Camp?” Ooh, that’s pretty important. “Got it.” “Great! Hey, if I didn’t race, what’s the headline going to be?” “‘Pegasus Filly Survives Magic War’,” Maud said after a moment’s thought. “Awesome!” Rainbow exclaimed. Then the doors shut, and the ambulance flew away. Maud watched until the ambulance diminished to a dot. On her slowly growing list of “Things to Do on Wednesday (When It Finally Happens)” she added submitting her story to the Rockville Gazette. She figured she owed Rainbow Dash for helping her save the world. She turned her head, to face Peach Cobbler’s Death Glare. “Alright, I’m going,” Maud said. “Am I going to be in this story of yours?” Peach asked. “Of course,” said Maud. “You were right there. You didn’t catch her, did you?” “Are you making fun of me?” “Of course not,” Maud lied. “Oh, OK. No, I didn’t catch her. But I would have.” “I’m writing that down,” said Maud, as she drew a picture of Peach’s ugly face in her notebook. During the long walk back to the Pie farm, Maud spent quite some time going over the story that Rainbow Dash had told her. Following the reasonable assumption that the fight between the two mares that Rainbow had witnessed was at the center of the time loops, there were two possibilities: either both ponies were evil and had to be dealt with, or one of them was good and the other one was evil. Now on one hoof, the pony named Starlight had blasted an innocent filly out of the sky for no apparent reason whatsoever. Well…“innocent” except for her immense ego and an inability to shut up. And on another hoof, the pony named Twilight hadn’t shot an innocent filly out of the sky for no apparent reason whatsoever. But this same pony had a dragon familiar. And dragons ate gems. So it was decided then: Twilight the alicorn was a menace, and it was Maud’s job to destroy her in order to save the timestream.