//------------------------------//
// What Lies Beyond 
// Story: Weirder Science 
// by Ironthread 
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It had been a long night for Princess Luna, and it was barely half over. An unfortunate fact of the nobility was that they rarely ever had ideas, but were quite good at generating convictions, the majority of which were something along the lines of “It sure would be nice if things got done around here, but I sure don’t want to have to pay to have it happen.” To the kind of people who occupied noble houses, however, this certainly looked like an idea, and therefore absolutely needed to be taken to one of the princesses that instant. As such, with much of the actual judicial work of court being done in the daytime hours, most of Luna’s time taking petitioners consisted of doing her best to show them that what they had just said was nonsense and then sending them out in a huff. This wore on a pony, even a princess, after a while, and by the time the midnight bells rang over Canterlot she was about ready to pull out Nightmare Moon again.

To the good fortune of everyone involved, however, the court attendant signaled the end of public petitions for the night, and so Luna was now free to enjoy her tea and get onto the much less infuriating, but slightly more tedious, matter of paperwork. Perhaps even a quick review of her subjects’ dreams, just to be sure.

It was in the middle of a sip of soothing earl grey that Luna was startled by a feeling close to shuddering coming down a magical connection she never really noticed she had. She sat up straight for a second, gazing forward in shock. Then, tea and all, she vanished in a flash of deep blue light.





There was a banging at the door.

“Celestia get off thy lazy buttocks immediately and open this door, there is something about which we must speak!”

Celestia stirred in her bed, oblivious to the noise.

“Oh, for - Celestia do not make us teleport in there!”

“Fiv mor mints…” Celestia mumbled, still not comprehending the words being spoken.

There was another flash, and Princess Luna was inside shaking her sister awake.

“Mm? Luna? It’s not nearly sunrise yet, what are you doing? Is that tea for me?” Celestia managed groggily once she woke up.

Luna, only now realizing her cup of tea was still clutched in her telekinetic grip, set it down on bedside table. “No, that is not- We need you to- It’s-” She took a moment to collect herself.
Losing her anachronisms as she calmed down, Luna said, “I felt… something, something from a connection I hadn’t realized I even had until now, and it trembled like everything was about to change. What is this? Surely you felt it-”

It came again, stronger this time, like a rolling wave.

Celestia was instantly awake. “I’ve only felt this once before,” she said. There was an insistent pull now, demanding somepony answer its call. “You’d better go,” said Luna. “I wouldn’t know what to do.”

Celestia nodded, and then tugged herself from the universe by her trembling connection.





The void opened to Celestia, seeming to expand out from her in every direction, though she knew this sensation was only the result of an intrinsic egotism. The void had in fact been there all along, she simply hadn’t been in the correct plane of existence to see it. As the last, abstract parts of her finally sidled in, somewhat late to the party, so too did the broad expanse of the cosmos that she stood on. Interdimensional travel was a strange beast that she never fully understood, though she had always expected that Twilight would study it ruthlessly if she ever acquired that ability. I suppose that’s never going to happen, she thought, and, turning around, realized rather abruptly that she had possibly never been more wrong.

Twilight gave her old mentor a look that was the result of a high-speed collision between a smile and nervous panic. “So,” she said, tentatively, “I suppose we both have some explaining to do.”





“Okay.” Twilight paused in her explanation of the day of the explosion to take a breath. “So, I was pretty much out of options, but I knew I could do some pretty tricky casting before I ran out of mana for the shield as long as none of it took too much power. Fortunately, memory spells are actually rather power-light, if concentration-heavy.”

“Memory spells? I dare say I had not done the reading up on them, that explains why I didn’t recognize what was going on. What in Equestria were they for?” Celestia asked.

“It was me! Every memory I had, I solidified into a rune and transcribed onto the floor. Nopony had ever tried something like it because doing memory spells in that way removes the memory from you, but I didn’t exactly need them at the time, what with the whole ‘imminent death’ situation. All I had in my head by the end was a copy of the plan I had cooked up.”

“So what then, you simply trusted that somepony would figure it out? That’s not like you.”

“Oh stars no, nopony would have been clever enough to get it, let alone cast the spell I’d cooked up to put me back together. But I could.” Twilight’s eyes gleamed with the delight of an artist revealing their masterpiece for the first time. “So I built a thaumic consciousness based on an image of my mind. It was a rush job, so she couldn’t access any of the memories scattered around, unfortunately. But, she had all my muscle memory when it came to spellcasting, and I outlined very clearly when I put her together that she would need to cast the spell I had implanted.

“I put her on top of that big, high bandwidth channeling circle so that as long as somepony supplied her power, she could put me back together. As a bonus, I needed a mental image for the reconstruction spell to work anyways, so that bucks two trees with one kick.

“Lastly, I enchanted the whole thing to survive the explosion, and there we go. When the explosion goes off and I get vaporized, She can get somepony to supply power and I’m back! That took a bit longer than expected though, the TC - she ended up calling herself Failsafe, by the way - took a while to get fully started up. By that time the basement was just storage, rather than a lab like I had thought. But it all worked out in the end, and now…” Twilight trailed off.

“Well.” Celestia said, starting to understand just why Twilight had been pulled here. “I suppose that answers that. My turn, then. This” - she gestured to the spinning cosmos around them - “Is a plane beyond our own. When a pony has done a great deed, something that shakes the very foundations of the universe, they are brought here.”

“Oh? So, for example, Starswirl the Bearded might have come here? What an honor, I -” Twilight was starting off again, Celestia could tell, so she decided to cut her off before she was too far gone.

“No, no, you would be able to tell if Starswirl had ever been here.”

“Why’s that?” Twilight asked, her thoughts interrupted. At that moment, however, a mote of purple light formed at her chest. It pulled back, and then split, each fragment beginning to orbit  around her, speeding up and slowly lifting her off the not-quite-ground they stood upon.

“Because this,” Celestia said, almost shouting over the noise of the swirling magic, “Is where alicorns are made!”

There was a shockwave of purple-black light, and the two were thrown back to their plane of existence.





“Well, that was an experience.” Said Celestia, now far above the tower of the Experimental Division, drifting gently to the ground with great flaps of her wings.

YOU CAN CERTAINLY SAY THAT AGAIN, said a voice from behind her.