//------------------------------// // Daydreams of Sunset - CH00 - I'm Real... right? // Story: Shards of Sunset // by fmriver //------------------------------// Sunset held out her hand so that the transformed Twilight could take it. She made sure to keep her expression open and kind, recalling how Princess Celestia would look at her in the early days of her apprenticeship, before she become confident in herself. Behind her eyes however, she was battling with the excess amount of magic in her system. She could feel it slowly permeating her flesh, just barely under her control. As she had learned before, the magic of Harmony was never meant to be held by a single being, much less one with as little innate magical potential such as her human body. Sunset knew she just had to hold it in for a few more minutes at the most and she would save the day. Though she had tried her best she could feel the stress on her body. The white encompass they found themselves in was probably the closest this realm had to the astral plane. If this had happened in Equestria, Sunset would probably have ascended into Alicornhood, based on her fragmented research years ago. Not that it mattered, she supposed. Fixing the cascading ruptures between realities had been her focus from the start, and no matter what came next, she had saved both worlds she called home. Even risking a burnout, she was glad for that knowledge, along with the fact that she estimated she had enough power to fix Twilight and send her back down. Hopefully she would have enough to fix the damage done to herself. That was actually the leading theory on cause of death during failed ascensions. Usually a pony that makes it to the realm has exhausted all their innate magic, and require the boost they get from a successful ascension to leave the astral plane. If they fail to gain their wings, they would lack the magic to return to reality, and fade away, as from a technical standpoint their bodies had been consumed in the initial trip. Twilight finally capitulated silently, taking Sunset's hand. She smiled, knowing that with this final step, she would have saved everyone else at least, come what may. She could feel her magic destabilizing faster than expected. She didn't think she would have enough for both of them. Sunset pulled Twilight into a hug, her wings encompassing them both. “Twilight, it’s going to be alright. I chose to help, and I knew what it meant. Remember that.” “Wait, what do you mean by-?!” Twilight got out before Sunset expelled her back to Canterlot. Sunset was now alone, watching as the white glare around her began to fracture into nothingness before her eyes. She curled up, floating in the center of this dimming pocket of light, feeling herself slowly getting pulled apart into the greater expanse of the relatively empty astral plane. As her final moments approached, Sunset dwelled on the one main regret she had. She wished she had listened to Princess Twilight, and been able to at least gotten closure with Celestia, before now. She would have liked to see Equestria again, with all the changes that Twilight had described since her self imposed exile through the enchanted mirror. As Sunset closed her eyes for the final time, she wondered if she would at least get to be in one of the palace’s windows for her final act of heroism. Sunset unexpectedly had the oddest sensation of being pulled back together, like yarn being wound back into a ball, and then that ball being used to weave her back together. It wasn't pleasant, but it wasn't painful. By the end of it, she felt a brief moment of weightlessness before crashing down onto the floor. “Oof! *cough cough* … how? Well, however you did it, thanks princess” Sunset muttered as she lay on the ground with her eyes tightly closed from the painful migraine that had hit her now that she had a corporeal body once again. Sunset presumed Princess Twilight had figured a way to restore her, and however that happened, she was grateful, though she would continue hugging the ground for a while longer. The floor felt like rustic wood planks. She could smell a mix of parchment paper, dirt, and a hint of ozone, likely residue from the spell. “It-it worked...it worked? It worked! Twilight it worked! She's alive! Aliiiive!” Exclaimed a voice Sunset didn't recognize, surprising her enough to flinch and finally open her eyes. It seemed like she was in a basement laboratory, which looked just like Twilight’s old lab under the Golden Oak library. Obviously it couldn't be the same, as that had been destroyed by Tirek, but Twilight had created an almost seamless facsimile. Sunset was apparently in pony form today, which made sense based on the side of the portal she now found herself. Sunset wondered how Twilight had been able to get her essence to coalesce on this end, though perhaps she had figured out some new property of astral realms that made it possible. She wouldn't put it past the gifted Alicorn. She seemed to be in the center of a magical circle, with components of a couple summoning and warding circles she had read about, but modified to the point that she couldn't quite figure out all the components. This was incredible work. Sunset looked up and saw the mare that spoke. She was mint green, with highlights in her mane. She had large tinted goggles around her neck, though the indents around her eyes showed she'd just recently pulled them down. She was staring at Sunset with open astonishment. Beside her, an exhausted Twilight was panting, sprawled on the ground and gulping down water from a canteen as if she had just run a marathon, though she also had her eyes fixed on Sunset. Something seemed slightly off with the purple pony though. She looked a bit pudgier than the last time Sunset saw her. “Twilight… you did the impossible and saved me again heheh...ow my heeeead…” Sunset rolled onto her side, or at least she tried to before she apparently twisted something on her back. “… what the?!” It took a moment for Sunset's exhausted mind to realize she apparently had bent her right wing awkwardly. Realizing she now had wings was the last straw. It was at this point that the stress reached critical levels and she fainted. “Twilight! It worked, it worked! Even better than I could have dreamed of!” Lyra pranced around the library lobby area gleefully. Twilight lay bonelessly in the nearby lounge chair, still trying to recovered from the exhausting magical procedure. “I’m-did you see what I saw?! Celestia, we have another actual alicorn on our hands! Artificially created at that! Becca is going to kill us! The whole purpose of the procedure was so she wouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb anymore and could live in peace among us Lyra!” Twilight admonished her former classmate. Lyra looked at Twilight, her demeanor getting more serious for a moment. “Twi… I’m not as good at magic as you, but I’m CSGU alumn too. I couldn’t care less if she had come out half pony half human! I felt how close we were to losing her thread completely in the weave. Right now, I’m celebrating that my friend is alive and if she ended up as an alicorn instead of a unicorn then that's just cake. She's even registering as biologically and genetically stable!” Twilight couldn't really argue with her friend and former classmate. It actually HAD been a very close thing. For that reason she forced herself back up, and proceeded to run additional scans on her. Her newly created magical reserves continued to fill, and from what Twilight could tell, would likely end up being near on par with her own. Her apparent age was actually slightly younger than Twilight’s, with the diagnostic spell returning an age of seventeen. Becca had actually been a bit older, in her late twenties. The new alicorn slept through the evening and most of the following day. Twilight took the time to perform further tests seeking to find out what had caused the unexpected results. Twilight was putting off informing the princess, as she dearly did not want to face the disappointment that was imminent. Which is why she continued to bury herself in making sure Becca was alright. Finally in the late afternoon, she woke up. The only problem is that something apparently went very wrong with the spell they had purposefully designed to be very permanent. “Hey Twilight -yawn- how long was I out?” Sunset called out as she entered the room. She had woken up, and groggily come down, following the sounds coming from the kitchen. She wasn’t quite sure where she was, but it sure did look cozy. Maybe it’s the mint pony’s place? she thought to herself. It kind of reminded her of Twilight’s description of her old treehouse, thought Sunset never got to see it herself. “Hey, you’re awake!” Twilight stopped what she was doing and hugged her friend. “You had us worried for a moment there. You’ve been out since last night, and it’s almost evening again. I’m just finishing getting dinner ready. Lyra should be here in a coupe minutes.” Sunset hugged her friend back with one hoof around her neck, still feeling the joy of having survived what she had been sure was an impossible situation. Her wings did an abortive attempt at following suit, before Sunset remembered to fold them back tightly against her sides, brely saving Twilight from getting poked in the eye with some feathers. “Great, is Lyra the mint green pony that I saw when you guys rescued me?” She felt her friend stiffen up completely. “Uh…. Twi? Hey-hey Twilight?! You’re hugging is a bit tight… can...you...let...go...gah!” Sunset took the chance to catch her breath after Twilight finally relaxed her grip. “Y-you don’t know who Lyra is?” Her friend’s face was in a rictus, alarming Sunset. “Uh… am I supposed to? I mean she looks familiar… maybe from my time at Celestia’s school?” “Can you tell me what you remember?” “Alright, I’m Sunset Shimmer, former student of Celestia. I’ve been living in an alternate reality as a ‘human’. I recently had to save said reality from begin destroyed by YOUR dimensional twin, where I… I...well, I sacrificed myself to save the day.” "Oh Tartarus... She thinks 'Sunset Shimmer and the Friendship Games' was real?! That wasn't even on the pile of material! Uhuh... So... I've got some good news, and some not so good news..." Becca was a twenty eight year old read headed human, that had accidentally been transported to Equestria over a year ago. As the only human in all of Equestria, she had gotten depressed when it became clear she would not be able to ever go home. She had been able to finally integrate in Ponyville society for the most part by then thankfully. After a while however, the fact she would never have the family she had dreamed of growing up, or be able to easily travel through the land without frightening ponies that didn’t know her, had begun to gnaw at her. After six months of getting the unfortunate news, she had approached Lyra, her friend and ‘handler’ as Becca would say, and through her Twilight. Becca asked about the possibilities of having her species reassigned with magic. The problem came that most of the magic was aimed at making the changes for aggressive purposes, and were either not permanent, were not full body, or would severely impact her life expectancy by decades. While Twilight had been working on that, Becca had gotten into Lyra's secret fanfiction and art stash, and discovered Lyra’s near novel length story based on Twilight’s adventures, crossing over with what she had learned about earth and humanity from Becca. She’d fallen in love with the sketches of Sunset Shimmer, which mirrored her own quite closely, thought Lyra had used a more orange tone on her skin than a natural human skin, and put in two toned hair. It was still clearly based on Becca, herself a read head. She had come clean to Lyra, and then proceeded to show the sketches to Twilight. These seemed to spark off an idea for the theoretically inclined pony, and they ended up with a complicated magical circle that basically kludged together several different transformation magics. They did some testing by turning frogs to mice, though Fluttershy put a halt to their animal testing soon after. At this point it had been a full thirteen months since Becca had arrived in Equestria and this would be the biggest experiment that Twilight would perform on the human since the one that got Becca stranded there in the first place. They would use the fruits of Lyra’s imagination as a basis to create a template energy matrix. Twilight had been inspired by the magic pond that Pinkie had discovered. Then they would use genetic material from the couple dozen ponies to create a primordial soup of sorts, and use changeling magic to force the genetic material to mimic the template held in place, with safety precautions to force the artificial genetic pattern to be viable against all 50 donors. This would make the results both look and actually be a pony down to their cells. A dash of chaos magic would help the disparate genes to glue together in place. Becca would be shunted into the astral plane with her body losing cohesion, then brought back down and forced via a heavily modified polymorphic spell, to adopt the genetic pattern as well as the phenotype created earlier. Then she would simply re-materialize as a Red and Gold maned unicorn, with possibly a Sun cutie mark, though Twilight highly doubted that last part. Later review would let Twilight discover that she accidentally contaminated the samples with a couple hairs, making her the unwitting 51st donor and likely cause for Becca’s alicorn hood. This had troubling societal connotations, which meant that the notes on magic they had done would need to be sealed away instead of used for ponies looking for other options in reassignment (a growing need as society began accepting transtribal and transgender ponies). "So... what you're saying is that I'm not really Sunset Shimmer, but this human... Rebecca Sterling... and the fact that I am in a pony body mostly like the one I have memories growing up in, along with all my memories actually... is all fake?"