When Penn had emerged from the store's bathroom, Sunset could tell that his near-death experience had a significant effect on him, physically. His face was still pale and she was pretty sure his reddened eyes were an indicator that he had been vomiting, but other than that he appeared to be fine. He took one deep breath, held his hand level, and pushed it own in a calming motion.

Sunset flashed him her best reassuring smile. She knew that she and her friends were more of the exception than the rule when it came to how well they handled life-threatening situations. It was obvious that this was the first time Penn had ever been threatened like that.

"No need to apologize. After all, you saved my life from that... 'dalek' thingy."

"Well, don't sell yourself short! That paint idea was genius!" He gave her a weak grin and gave her a firm pat on the shoulder.

"Well, I'm not the one who ran in like a berserker with a sledgehammer!" She grinned and gave him an encouraging punch on the shoulder. "That thing had me dead to rights before you nailed the eyestalk!"

A small amount of color returned to Penn's face as he sheepishly looked back at the exploded remains. While he had been gone, Sunset had taken the time to inspect it. The whole thing smelled foul and she had nearly joined him in vomiting when she had caught sight of a half-exploded creature inside with stubby tentacles and a single, glassy eye.

She gave him another toothy grin and poked a finger through the hole in his shirt to jab at his chest. If this really WAS his first time dealing with danger like this, she wanted to encourage him. Despite the fact he seemed older than her, she couldn't help feeling a kind of seniority over him from her experience dealing with other dangers before. Rainbow Dash would probably say something about them being "awesome superheroes" and "inspiring the public." Sunset resisted the urge to roll her eyes at even the imaginary remarks.

Penn's face flushed harder, and Sunset decided she was starting to push it too far with the compliments.

"What was all that 'time war' stuff about, anyway? It sounded like you were talking about something... alien?"

"Just a bunch of buzzwords and triggers from the same TV show as the dalek. I'm a big fan, so I know enough to SOUND like I know what I'm talking about." He pounded one fist gently against his chest. "Totally human. One heart."

Sunset turned away from the monster and back towards the door. She took a deep breath.

"Well, what do we do, now? I'm still lost, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't worried about more of these coming after my friends..." Sunset took a deep breath, trying not to envision what might happen to someone like Fluttershy if she were being chased down by one of these things.

"I-I guess that we should get working on finding them, huh?" The longer he talked, the more firm his voice became, his confidence returning to him. As he stepped outside however, Sunset watched his head immediately snap upwards and his gaze fixate completely on the sky. Sunset couldn't help feeling some trepidation as she followed after him, looking up to try and see what had captured his attention so thoroughly. The scene that greeted her, however, was unlike anything that she had ever seen in even her greatest dreams or worst nightmares.

The sky was tearing itself apart, for lack of better words. The sky rippled like a sail in the wind, shaking and billowing as streaks of lighting and fire tore their way across from horizon to horizon. Galaxies and nebulae hung just above their heads, undulating in a kaleidoscope of colors. Figures were shilouetted from behind, some brandishing grand weapons of starlight and void, others with strange and warped bodies of countless arms and lashing out with blasts of unknowable power. Sunset didn't even know what to think as she could only look on in awe and horror as celestial armies and terrible titans clashed above her head, sending fresh ripples through the canvas sky above them.

"Amaterasu, Vishnu, Odin... Emperor Jimmu's terracotta army..." Penn whispered breathlessly in disbelief. "Zeus, Ra, Quetzalcoatl, Mars, Osiris..."

Sunset recognized the majority of the names, but was unable to process what he was implying.

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When they had finally regained their senses enough to tear their eyes away, Penn had suggested regrouping at his house to try and decide on a course of action. Sunset agreed, and the two of them had set out on a long trek across town. It felt like they were walking for nearly an hour before they turned up at a tiny house on the border of a small playground. The roof sagged in the middle and the weatherproofing was chipped and cracked, covered in faded yellow paint. The door itself had seen better days, stripped down to exposed wood in vertical stripes. As he unlocked the door, Sunset noticed him ram his shoulder against it to crack it open.

"Be it ever so humble..." Penn muttered, opening the door wider and motioning for her to enter, "there's no place like home."

Sunset tried not to cringe as she stepped inside. There was exposed and hole-ridden drywall everywhere, and a quick glance revealed that there wasn't a single properly covered outlet or light switch in the house. She was screaming internally as Penn took a tender grip of an exposed light switch and flicked the lever.

"Sorry, the place was midway through a renovation when they let me move in. I'm a family friend, and I was getting kicked out of my apartment." He shrugged sheepishly. "I HAVE been doing a little work! Check it out! Totally rebuilt these windows!"

Indeed, it looked as if the windows and the entire frames around them had been recently redone, with smooth wood and a clean white finish. She had to admit, for amateur work, the carpentry looked decent.

Sunset blinked in confusion, then glanced back out the window, making sure that the world was still ending outside. Yup. With a sigh, she flopped onto his couch, sinking deep into the fluffy surface.

"Sunset, I can't do anything about THAT." He pointed upwards to illustrate his point. "I don't even know what it means. For now, all that can be done is to enjoy the light show. Besides..." He chuckled darkly to himself as he walked back and offered her a bottle of red liquid. "I'm a millennial. We've all been waiting for the end of the world ever since we were old enough to understand global warming was real and the economy was in the toilet before we even had a chance to participate. That's why we all have clinical depression and joke about wanting to die."

There was a beat of silence as Sunset stared at him in horror before Penn broke out into a wide grin.

"I'm kidding! Come on, if there's any time for dark humor, it's at the end of the world!"

Penn shrugged, shaking the bottle as an indication she should take it. She begrudgingly took it and twisted open the lid with a series of cracks. The liquid inside was tangy and slightly salty, but refreshing. She hadn't realized just how thirsty she was until that moment, but it hit the spot. Penn took a long swig of his own drink before letting out a long sigh of satisfaction.

"So. From what you told me, you and your six friends were ALL trying to close a magical portal to Equestria..."

"And basically, it sounds like you all got caught into some kind of feedback loop that overloaded the Elements of Harmony and... blew up the portal?"

"And then you woke up where I found you..." He tapped his chin thoughtfully for a few moments.

"I don't know what could have gone wrong! I wasn't the only one who did the math on this!" Sunset threw her hands into the air in frustration. "Everything was checked and double-checked from both sides! Harmonic resonance of two magic sources, spatial wrinkling when the portals closed, we didn't forget a single factor on either end!"

"Well, I couldn't call myself an expert on magic portals, so forgive me if this is a stupid question..."

"I've always believed there's no such thing." Sunset's response was more reflex than thoughtful. That had been one of the few of Princess Celestia's teachings that had truly drilled its way through her thick skull.

Sunset blinked, unsure if she was understanding what he was suggesting. Penn took a deep breath and sighed.

"Look. If you've got a 'portal,' that's basically a wormhole, right? Two different points in space connected by a passageway?" Sunset nodded, encouraging him to continue. In a matter of seconds, he finished off his drink and placed the bottle between his palms, pressing on both ends at once. "Well, you applied pressure at both ends.... but what about the passage section in the middle?" Slowly, he began pushing his hands towards one another, crunching the bottle in on itself. Sunset's eyes widened as she began to see the idea he was trying to get across. As his hands applied greater and greater pressure, the bottle began to expand in places it had formerly bent inward. With a grunt of exertion, Penn gave up on crushing the bottle, taking a deep breath from the exertion.

"You get the idea without me pushing until this explodes, right? I mean, that doesn't really explain the magical feedback, but it might explain how you got here, along with the dalek. Whatever happened looks like it might have broken the barriers between universes." He looked up through the window, taking another astonished look at the sky. "Which might explain why every pantheon of gods to ever exist seem to now be battling for supremacy... They finally caught sight of one another."

Sunset swallowed loudly, peeking out the window again. Things had hardly changed above them, it was still a vicious battleground.

"Pssh! Screw that! Even if you DID knock down the walls, it's THEIR choice to fight each other! It's the dalek's choice to blow up the gas station. You just... enlightened the multiverse. They're the ones who choose what to do with it."

Sunset smiled a little bit, feeling slightly better. He was right, but it didn't do much to abate the blame she still felt mounting on her shoulders.

"So, then, it stands to logic that your friends probably got sent to other worlds, too."

Sunset nodded along for a second, only for a second meaning in his words to sink in after a few seconds. "Wait, 'sent to other worlds, TOO?'" Sunset leaned forward, narrowing her eyes at her host. "You're saying that as if I'M on another world..."

Penn's jaw quickly clamped shut, the tip of his tongue caught between his front teeth.

Penn's jaw unclamped slightly, only enough to let his tongue slip back inside his mouth.

Penn pushed his chair away from Sunset, rolling his way out of sight and into the kitchen. The last thing she saw was him making a "so-so" motion with one of his hands as he shrugged uncomfortably and made a high-pitched "eeeeeeeh?" noise.

"I-I mean, in my defense, you ARE the only person we saw with orange skin and multi-colored hair all the way from the park to here..."

Sunset rose out of her chair, walking into the kitchen. Penn still hadn't changed his pose once he was out of sight, posing with his shoulders shrugged so hard they were practically up to his ears. In a matter of seconds, Sunset decided that she had an easier way of getting answers out of him: magic. A quick peek at his memories would give her all the information she needed, and he wouldn't even know it. As she reached to take a hold of his arm, however, he moved it out of the way. Narrowing her eyes, Sunset tried to grab his hand, only for him to defensively move it out of the way again.

After a moment's pause, Sunset lunged forward while Penn lunged to the side, rolling out of the chair and onto the floor. As Sunset crashed into the chair and was sent rolling across the tiny kitchen, Penn scrambled to his feet, holding up his hands defensively.

"O-okay, Sunset, we're all VERY stressed here, time-space is broken, and we can't be certain that certain pieces of information exchanging between parties won't damage it further..."

Sunset turned around, taking a seat in the chair instead of continuing to chase him. She knew Penn was nervous. She knew how to get nervous people to feel intimidated. She knew how to get nervous people to give her what she wanted. She leaned back in the chair for a moment, crossing one leg over the other as her face settled into a disapproving glare. Penn anxiously glanced from side to side, seemingly trying to look anywhere but at her. She folded her arms over her chest and leaned forward, narrowing her eyes from 'disapproving' to 'interrogating.'

"I will ask you this one time and one time only, Penn. I didn't tell you what my magic does, but you knew why I was trying to touch you. You KNEW. Where. Am. I?"

Penn visibly squirmed under her gaze, trying to hold up under her scrutiny and obviously failing. Sunset knew she had nothing on Fluttershy's "stare," but she could summon up a nasty glare of her own when she wanted to, a useful talent left over from her days as a bully.

"But I- What if- UGH! FINE! I'll tell you everything, just stop looking at me like that!"

"Okay, just- It's a good thing you're already sitting down- I need you to just listen to me and believe what I tell you, alright?"

"The reason I was so willing to believe you when you said magic brought you here was because... I'm a fan. I KNEW who you were, I knew you had magic."

"Well, a spin-off of a TV show..." Penn corrected her, awkwardly rubbing at the back of his head. "The main show is about Princess Twilight and her friends... The time you went and stole her crown and tried to take over the school was a movie special."

"Then there was a movie about you guys fighting the Dazzlings... a movie about the Friendship Games..."

Sunset's eyes widened as she realized that he was beginning to outline all of the key events of her life in the past few years.

"A movie about Camp Everfree, a three-part TV special, a series of online animated shorts and music videos- By the way, I LOVE the Rainbooms's music! You guys are really great!"

"And then another movie about Wallflower and the memory stone and a movie about that time you guys were all working in a fair and got zapped into a magic phone and-" Penn seemed to finally notice the fact that Sunset's eyes had grown wide as dinner plates and her breathing had grown shorter and much faster.

"I-I think you get the idea..." He muttered, glancing around at their surroundings. "And, on the plus side, it looks as if you knowing all of this didn't cause any paradoxes that will instantly wipe us off of the face of creation! That's a positive!"

Sunset's head was spinning. Her life, all of her mistakes and problems, every secret, had been broadcast and uploaded to the internet of another WHOLE WORLD? What about when she wanted privacy? What about her innermost thoughts? Was her PAST safe? Did they know anything from BEFORE she had stolen Princess Twilight's crown? Did this mean that her life was nothing but the combined efforts of godlike animators that could end her existence at any moment? Was her "free will" being warped and bent her whole life in order to force her to conform to a predetermined script? Have I EVER had free will at ALL?

Sunset was suddenly drawn back to the present, realizing that she was hyperventilating and her hands were trembling. Instantly, she pressed her hands against her lap to stop the shaking and forced herself to take deep breaths. This was no time for an existential crisis.

Unless that was what the scriptwriters WANTED her to think, in which case the only true act of rebellion she could take would be to HAVE an existential crisis and go against them- Unless they considered an existential crisis to be "in character" and had already written a script based AROUND her having a-

Sunset took another deep breath. She HAD to think clearly. That was not an option, it was a necessity.

"Th-thank you for being honest with me... If you really thought that was going to create a paradox, it must have taken a lot of courage."

Penn nodded and reached into the refrigerator, taking out another red drink and downing half of it in a matter of seconds.

"I don't know how you blowing up a portal between your world and Equestria managed to somehow break the boundaries between my fiction and your reality, but it appears that everything that is fiction here in MY world is beginning to... bleed... over..." The color drained from Penn's face as the full ramifications of what he was saying dawned on him. The hand holding his drink began to tremble as he raised his to his mouth and downed the rest of it in one go. Once he was finished, he looked back down at the bottle. In all honesty, Sunset had no idea what myriad of possibilities were going through his head, and she wasn't certain if she wanted to.

"Oh my stars, all of fiction is becoming reality..." Slowly, he turned his gaze to meet hers, eyes wide with a mix of awe and terror.

The Multiverse in a Nutshell

by Pennington Inkwell

Welcome To My Apocalypse