//------------------------------//
// Chapter 4 
// Story: Friendship is Epic 
// by Bramble Rose 
//------------------------------//

MLP and characters created by Hasbro & Lauren Faust
Random references by lots of other sci-fi and fantasy

Friendship is Epic is taken from random craziness in pony-chats across the internet. I have collated them into a story - but the ideas in general are fueled by the casual comments of dozens of random anonymous fans.

MY LITTLE PONY: FRIENDSHIP IS EPIC
Part 4

Doctor Whooves watched Twilight walk off with Diamond Tiara. Now there was a pony who'd benefited, in this dark future. She had really overcome her foalish selfishness from the time period he was more used to. He laughed softly to himself as Derpy trotted off happily chiming, "Food, food, food!" as if she hadn't just been eating an hour ago or so. Or ten years ago, depending on how you looked at it, ao maybe she was justified in being hungry. He grinned as he followed after to see what sort of spread was laid out.

As could be expected of the new Sweet Apple Acres, virtually every dish had apples in it - apple crumble, apple crunch, apple pies... and for desert, some apple cupcakes and apple tarts. Not exactly the post-apocalyptic fare Doctor Whooves may have expected, but they certainly did have the orchard for it. Standing behind the food, helping to pass it out, was two ponies. The first, Doctor Whooves recognized as Silver Spoon, though she was wielding a long wooden ladle at the moment instead of the fancy spoon of her cutie mark. The other was Twist, the young candy-maker he remembered, but older, of course.

They sat down and ate, with the various ponies whispering quietly, all eyes upon them. Doctor Whooves supposed they must not be used to having new ponies around.  Derpy came back with two plates, one for herself and one for the Doctor.  They ate quietly while his mind churned quickly, trying to figure out what was going on with the information at hoof.  He could think of seventeen different ways this could have happened, all of them unlikely.  The delicious food sat in front of him, untouched.

Derpy noticed that he wasn't touching his food, and happily kept him from wasting food by eating it for him.  Then she happily trotted back to look for seconds.

Twilight took the seat that Derpy had just vacated. Doctor Whooves glanced up, then looked around to see all the ponies perking up, looking at her with a great deal more interest and hope than they'd been looking at Derpy and himself. "Well?" he asked her.

"Oooo, I don't know..." Derpy was saying. "Are apples all you have?  What about sugar cubes?"

Twilight sighed softly... she shook her head. "This ... has been a very surreal day for me," she said softly. "I can't doubt that you have a time machine. Not after seeing all this. It just seems so ... impossible. And the future is so ... horrible. How can I go back, and do anything, knowing that this will happen?  That anything I do will be worthless?"

Doctor Whooves smiled wanly. "Oh, no, it doesn't work that way. Time is always changing, always in flux. When we go back and change things, then this will never happen."

"How about any apple muffins? Do you have any apple muffins?" asked Derpy.

The entire area went dead silent. Not a whisper. Barely a breath. Twilight started to say something, but Doctor Whooves held up his hoof, motioning her to be quiet, too. Everyone was staring at Derpy with worry, anger, or outright fear on their face.

Doctor Whooves looked around, startled ... everything started connecting together in his head. Mutant Ponies. No Magic. Temporal Interference. The sun hadn't moved the entire time they'd been here. And now, a fear of muffins. He turned to look at Twilight Sparkle, and started talking very rapidly. "After you disappeared, they put together a search party for you, but couldn't find you. When searching the library, though, someone ... oh, Pinkie, maybe ... found a recipe for muffins. She made them, passed them out to the search parties, and all the adults had some. But soon after, the muffin-ponies started mutating into horrible violent mutant ponies, and not long after that, the world started dying... stuck forever in an eternal late afternoon, once Luna and Celestia both fell to the mutants, and no one was around who could start up the sun again."

Twilight stared, stunned. "How ... how did you find that out?!"

Doctor Whooves gave a little shrug. "Ah, just a lucky guess."

"The only problem," Twilight said with a soft, confused tone to her voice, "Is that I don't have any books with evil muffin recipes in it ... much less sitting out for someone to find."

"Oh, no," Doctor Whooves agreed. "Of course you wouldn't. He would have planted it for someone to find after you disappeared. All part of his plan."

"You keep talking about this 'him.' Who are you talking about?" Twilight was frustrated. He kept talking just around the edge of her understanding, as if she should obviously know what he was referencing.

"His name is Master Spur. He's another time pony, like me. One of the few left."

Twilight gave him a suspicious look. "Time pony?" she asked. "What is that? You look like an earth pony."

"No, earth ponies look like time ponies! We were here first!"

"Then how come I've never heard of you?"

Doctor Whooves sighed. "Well, the city of Gallupfrey was wiped out over 5000 years ago," he admitted sadly. "And all the time ponies with it."

Twilight frowned. "Wait. If all the time ponies were wiped out ... then how ... you ..."

"Time Machine!" Derpy cried merrily, as she sat down next to them with a plate full of apple tarts. "Mmmm, yummy!" She dug in happily and messily, little bits of apple and flaky pastry flying all over the place.

"Right!" said Doctor Whooves excitedly. "So all we have to do is get back to the TARDIS, get you back five minutes after you left, and there'll be no search party, no mysterious cookbook, and no baked bads. No mutants, no loss of magic, no dark future."

Twilight blinked. "But if there's no dark future, then we wouldn't arrive here in a dark future, and we wouldn't find out what we need to know to keep it from happening, and we might not get back in time... and then it'd all happen again."

With a shake of his head, the time pony let out a laugh. "No, no. See, you're thinking of time as a linear sequence of cause and effect, or effect and cause. Time isn't like that at all!"

"Then ... what's it like?"

"Oh, just kinda... wibbly-wobbly, timey wimey ..." He gave her a bright-eyed grin.

Twilight looked at him with a very unimpressed expression. "That's not a very useful answer," she said flatly.

"Sure it is, you just don't understand it! Come along, Twilight, Derpy, it's time to fix ... time! Allon-sy!"

The Crusaders were happy to escort them in their Scootbuggy back to the ruins of Doctor Whooves' house, though they seemed to be under the impression that they'd left some useful tools there. That was true, Twilight supposed, they just wouldn't be coming back to Sweet Apple Acres with the tools.

The hopeful eyes of every pony on her made Twilight feel queasy, as they got ready to leave. She felt, in some way, like she was abandoning them, even though she hoped to give them a better world, so that they'd never know what had passed here. Only Diamond Tiara's sad eyes didn't show that hope - just the dull determination to keep going on without hope.  The way she looked at her ... she knew Twilight was not planning on coming back. Twilight paused, and stepped away from the preparations for leaving.  She needed to give at least some small bit of hope to the leader of quite possibly the last ponies in the entire world. "Diamond," she whispered, "Don't worry. I'm going to try to fix all this. I don't know if I can do it, but Doctor Whooves seems to think we can. But you're right, I won't be back."

Diamond Tiara nodded, but her eyes still had that sad look in them, the look of someone who has forgotten what hope even looks like. Twilight left before her heart broke.

They arrived at the burnt-out shell of Doctor Whooves' little house, skirting around the edge of the Everfree Forest to get there, and Twilight stomach churned even further.  "Where's the TARDIS?" she asked, a faint panic in her voice, looking over to Doctor Whooves.

The brown time pony looked back to her, a fierce and excited light in his eyes. "Well," he said, unperturbed, even a happy tone to his voice. "Here's where it gets interesting."