//------------------------------//
// 3: Explanations 
// Story: Shining Together 
// by Bookish Delight 
//------------------------------//

Fifty minutes later, Sunset stood in front of Canterlot High School's horse statue.

Though it was Saturday, the school remained open for sports team practice and other weekend extracurriculars. Sunset knew this in part due to the students walking around, and because she'd just turned down Rainbow Dash's invitations to watch the soccer team's scrimmages three times in as many minutes. In the end, she'd only managed to appease Rainbow with a promise to attend the next three home games.

With that out of the way, Sunset turned her attention back to the base of the statue, where the portal between worlds was contained. She used to worry about how much of a problem that would present, having a gateway between dimensions hiding in plain sight. Fortunately, this world's Twilight Sparkle, in the spirit of friendship—and a ravenous hunger for exclusive knowledge—had volunteered to put Sunset's fears to rest by running an extensive battery of tests. Using several detectors and measuring gadgets of Twilight's own design, in conjunction with Juniper Montage's arsenal of film studio-grade video cameras, they were able to deduce the reasons why no one had noticed said portal, even now.

First: As near as any of them could conclude, the portal was able to "sense" someone's desire to engage with it. Which meant they had to know the portal was even there in the first place, be fully aware of its purpose, and then, after both those criteria were met, expressly want to use it. Only then would it activate.

Second: Without that desire in play, it was impossible for people to see travelers coming into or out of the portal. To the untrained eye, if someone went through the portal, they were there one moment, gone the next—and vice versa. 

In other words, the portal worked much like the magical two-way journal currently powering it, both in terms of usage and how words appeared on its pages. It was a little shaky, but it checked out—Sunset saw students leaning against the base of the statue all of the time, yet none of them had ever fallen in. 

She still remembered the meeting she'd had with both Twilights regarding the phenomenon. Princess Twilight said that most connection-based magic, especially the Elements of Harmony, worked in a similar fashion, therefore seeing something like this at play wasn't surprising. Needless to say, none of that had flown with the human, scientific Twilight, trained since she was little to trust in verifiable evidence based on a completely different universe's set of physics laws. A back-and-forth lecture-off regarding the sapience potential of magic—and science!—promptly ensued between the two girls... until the both of them caught Sunset staring. 

And she would have gotten away with it, too, if not for the slack-jawed expression. The drool likely hadn't helped, either. Even thinking back on it now, though, Sunset still had no regrets. The whole thing had been ador(k)able beyond words. Still, even with Twilight's misgivings, the aforementioned conclusions had held true for over a year now, which was a huge weight off of Sunset's shoulders. 

And it meant that right now, the only portal-related entity Sunset had to worry about was still five minutes off.