//------------------------------//
// Chapter 2: Twenty Years later and Twenty-Five Years Younger 
// Story: Quantum Leap Forward 
// by Halira 
//------------------------------//

"Hey! Hey! Hey! Are you alright?" 

Violent shaking followed, and she groaned as she came back to consciousness. That was a really weird dream. As she opened her eyes, she saw a yellow... she wasn't sure if it was a colt or filly-- standing by her, looking very concerned.

She stared at the enigmatic foal in front of her. "Who? Who are you?"

The foal gasped. "Oh no! Candy lost her memory!" Then the foal's brow creased and eyes narrowed. "Are you playing a trick on me again?"

All she could do for a moment after that response was blink in confusion. "Who's Candy? Wait, what do you mean, again?"

The foal- and she still hadn't determined if they were a colt or filly- pointed a hoof at her. "You're Candy, silly. Do you really not remember, or are you making things up again?"

"My name's not Candy, it's Cheerilee," she replied, still somewhat disoriented by the situation.

The foal closed one eye and opened the other wide, as they did an overexaggerated examination of her. "Red fur, purple mane, no cutie mark, and a unicorn; you look like Candy Apple to me. I don't know who Cheerilee is." 

Her eyes went wide as she glanced down at herself. It wasn't a dream, or at least if it was, it was still going on.

The foal gasped again. "Does Candy have a secret twin sister named Cheerilee that Ma and Pa Apple have kept locked in the attic of Sweet Apple Acres for years, and now you have escaped from your imprisonment and replaced Candy in your quest for revenge for the wrongs done to you? Are you Candy's misunderstood but villain-of-the-week twin sister?"

Her mouth hung open for a moment, and she had to open and close it a few times before she could manage to find a reply for that. "No! Why in the world would you even consider that?"

The foal reached into their mane and pulled out a magnifying glass. They gripped it tightly in one fetlock as they held it up to her mouth, putting their eye right up to the glass to where it would be completely ineffective for its use. "Hmm... you don't talk like Candy." The foal then sniffed her and then rubbed a hoof against their chin in consideration. "You definitely don't have an axe-scent."

"Do you mean accent?" 

The foal nodded vigorously. "Yeah, that's what I said, axe-scent; though I never understood why creatures talking funny meant they smelled like axes. I'm not really sure what an axe smells like, to tell the truth. Maybe I should go get an axe and do a smell of it before I say for sure."

She took a deep breath. She was dealing with a foal. She dealt with foals all the time. The fact that she was in a foal's body didn't change the fact that she was experienced with dealing with foals. "Okay, well... I don't know who Candy is, but I'm not her evil twin sister. My name is Cheerilee. Do you think you could find an adult; maybe Starlight Glimmer, or Zecora?" Either of those two could figure out what Applebloom's potion had done and reverse its effect. 

That made the other foal frown. "Um, I know who Starlight Glimmer is. She's a friend of my mommy, and lives in that big castle, and teaches at the big school, but who's Zecora?"

"She's a zebra, the one who lives in the Everfree Forest," she explained calmly. "I'm guessing you're new in town, since I've never seen you before."

The yellow androgyn shook their head. "I've lived my whole life in Ponyville. I know everycreature, my mommy comes and greets each and every one of them when they move to town." His/her eyes got wide. "If you aren't Candy then that means you're new! I need to tell Mommy so she can throw you a welcome to Ponyville party!" The eyes turned suspicious. "You really aren't Candy, are you? Candy plays tricks like this all the time. You know what they say; fool me once, shame on you. Fool me four-hundred-seventy-three times, shame on me."

She gave the still-nameless foal an apprehensive look. "She's fooled you how many times?"

The foal shrugged. "I don't know. Who counts those things?"

You, apparently. She barely kept from saying that out loud. "Look... I still haven't gotten your name."

The foal grabbed her foreleg and started shaking it, then decided to go into a full hug instead. "I'm Cheese Slice, though my mommy calls me Lil' Cheese, and Miss Pumpkin calls me 'that yellow menace that's not allowed in her kitchens!'-- with an exclamation point, can't forget the exclamation point! Miss Silver Spoon calls me 'sit down and do your schoolwork', and Mr. Pound calls me 'stop eating all the customers cookies', and Miss Diamond calls me 'stop running in the store', and Miss Bon Bon calls me 'you little-"

She waved him/her to silence. "I think that is enough names, Cheese will do just fine." How had a foal with this type of reputation failed to come to her notice? He sounded worse than the Cutie Mark Crusaders at their worst. Something struck her about what he had mentioned. "Wait..  Silver Spoon tells you to do schoolwork? Are you homeschooled?" Cheese must be, as she never had a word of Cheese before this. Was Cheese a Spoon and that's why Silver Spoon got on him about schoolwork? Or perhaps a foal of one of the Spoons' servants, he did refer to Silver Spoon as Miss. She needed to have a serious talk with the Spoons about Cheese's education.

Cheese giggled. "No, silly. Miss Silver Spoon is the teacher. I thought you knew that since we're in her classroom. Don't you see her name up on the board?"

She looked up at the chalkboard. Sure enough, on the corner of the chalkboard, there was 'Miss Silver Spoon's Class' written in large letters. Below the writing was a very rough drawing of a mare with large glasses. Surrounding the stick-figure depiction of Silver Spoon were stick figure drawings of foals, as well as a few she interpreted to be dragons, yaks, and griffins. 

That pretty much confirmed that this was all a dream. She wasn't great at interpreting dreams, but she knew enough about psychology to put together a reasonable set of why things were the way they were. Her worries about Silver Spoon must have mixed with her anxiety about the Crusaders, creating a dream scenario where Silver Spoon became the teacher. Her being in a young filly's body was just a further reflection of her own anxiety. She probably really did have a bump on her head, and her mind turned that into a unicorn horn. Cheese was a general representation of all her students, and she couldn't tell Cheese's gender because Cheese didn't have any; Cheese was just a random construct of her imagination. Everything made sense in relation to what she had on her mind this morning. Even her name, Candy, mixed with what she had been thinking in relation to Twist. Why, she wouldn't be surprised in the least if Diamond Tiara showed up as a buckball star, as other information got mixed together. This was a dream, and all she needed to do was wake up.

She lifted a leg up and bit down on it, hard. She let out a yelp, but didn't wake up. Between that and the headache this was the most pain she had ever felt in a dream. 

"Why'd you do that?" Cheese asked as he/she gasped. 

"I was trying to wake up," she replied, as she rubbed the tender spot where her teeth had connected.

"You looked like you were awake already," Cheese said slowly, then jumped in excitement. "Oh! So you are sleepwalking, talking in your sleep, and sleeping with your eyes open. When Daddy is home, sometimes I do that at night. I swear he and Mommy are making all kinds of weird sounds in their bedroom, but my big brother or sister always stop me from looking. They tell me that I'm just sleepwalking with my eyes open, and that I need to go back to bed. I thought they were lying, but they told me I was dreaming that Mommy and Daddy were baking buns in the bedroom, and it had to be a dream because you don't bake buns in bedrooms-- you bake buns in kitchens."

She rolled her eyes. Most young foals could be fairly gullible, but Cheese was laughably so. She hoped that this wasn't some internal reflection of how she saw her students. She didn't think she saw them all as being this naive and gullible. If it was, then that was a personal problem she needed to resolve, as that wasn't a healthy way to see her students.. That would be for later, though, after she'd managed to wake up. 

"You made a big mess, we should clean it up, before you get in trouble," Cheese said, as the foal gestured back at the broken glass and pools of colored liquid and gunk back at the front of the classroom. "My mommy says that I should always clean up my messes, no matter how big a mess I made. She says that's taking responsitility."

"Responsibility," Cheerilee absently corrected. Then considered the situation. She still hadn't figured out how to wake up. Perhaps she should just see the dream through. "I don’t have any cleaning supplies. Can you do me a favor, and go find Miss Silver Spoon? I'm sure she can help me clean this up."

Cheese fidgeted in place. "Are you sure? She's going to be really mad when she sees the mess. Plus, I don't think you're supposed to be in here right now. It's a teacher work day."

She blinked. "Then what are you doing here?"

Cheese shuffled about some more. "I was worried about you-- I mean, I was worried about Candy. You-- she came in here with a bunch of stuff she took from the big school. Now it is all over the floor. Miss Applebloom is going to be really mad when she finds out that stuff was tooken, your-- Candy's parents too. A bunch of grown-ups are going to be mad."

The foal apparently wasn't wholly convinced that she wasn't Candy. Perhaps they weren't so gullible after all, and just tried to be trusting. Cheese apparently cared a great deal about his/her friend. The androgynous foal was surprisingly developed for a dream character. Come to think of it, everything about this dream was supremely detailed. Thinking about that caused her to briefly question whether she was in a dream at all. 

No. Impossible. The only other explanation was mental time travel, and you don’t get that from color-changing potions and the contents of a fire extinguisher… unless the Crusaders were involved. Time travel shenanigans were not unheard of in Ponyville, but she had no idea how to respond to being thrown through time. She could run and hide from a monster, play dead if a supervillain showed up, jump on her desk if a wild beast got in her classroom, but what was she supposed to do when trapped in the future? Her disaster preparedness wasn't up to the task on that one. The only thing she could do is pretend it wasn't a possibility and hope that it turned out not to be.

No, ignoring that possibility wasn't a good idea, either. She needed to have a plan, just in case. "Just go get Silver Spoon," she instructed. If it did end up being the case she was tossed through time, some alternate reality, or something of that nature, then the first thing she needed to do was find somepony she knew and convince them that she was Cheerilee instead of Candy. Silver Spoon was the closest option to start with. She'd probably eventually need to go to Starlight Glimmer, but she needed to have ponies she knew to make a case for her. If it turned out to be just a dream there was no harm done in preparing for the worst. 

"Okay… but she's going to be mad about the mess, and that we were in her classroom when she wasn't here," Cheese replied with a sad shake of his head. The foal ran off towards the door, stopping briefly to pick up a rubber chicken of all things, before hurrying out. 

Since she might be waiting a few minutes she decided to take better stock of her situation. She was calmer now, and the initial shock of being in the wrong body had worn off.

The first thing she did was take a good look at herself in the mirror. She'd gotten a look at herself earlier, but the shock had left her getting only a few base details. Looking herself over now, she determined she couldn't be more than eight years old. She was slightly more muscular than a unicorn filly that age might normally be. Her flank was decidedly blank, but that wasn't unusual for a foal that age; at that age group some foals would have cutie marks, but half or more would still be waiting for them. Her mane was curly, but it looked well brushed. This foal had the same green eyes as herself, or at least a very close shade of green. She noticed some loose soil on the frogs of her hooves. As an earth pony, she was fairly familiar with different types of soil, even though she hadn't farmed since she was a young teen. The soil on her hooves was definitely from a tended field, and might indicate that Candy lived on a farm, but it could just as easily show that she had detoured across somepony's fields. Her fur had a gentle coat of dirt that anypony who ran through town might pick up. 

Having gotten a better look at herself, she decided to get a better look at her classroom-- or Silver Spoon's classroom, as the case seemed to be. The nearest poster had a picture of what looked like Princess Twilight Sparkle, if Twilight Sparkle were proportioned like Princess Celestia. The poster had the new Princess sitting on a throne, smiling, and surrounded by ponies and other creatures. It had gold lettering at the top that read Celebrating Twenty Years of Rule by Ponyville's Own Princess Twilight Sparkle Twenty years? She had just taken the throne mere months before. The case for time travel, rather than a dream, was stronger now. 

As she sat and stared at the poster, she tried to think of the ramifications of being in the future. Did she just disappear from the past? Where did the actual Candy go to? Was Candy back in her body immediately following Applebloom's botched potion show and tell? That last question made her feel faint again. The idea of her life, more importantly her classroom, being run by an eight-year old filly had dire implications. What kind of mess would she be returning to? 

There was another upsetting aspect to being in the future. While she was convinced Starlight Glimmer, or some other pony, could get this fixed and send her back home, there was the fact she couldn't help but learn things she'd rather not know in the meantime. 

Silver Spoon was a prime example of things she'd rather not know about. It was easy to tell by looking around the classroom that Silver Spoon was a dedicated and caring teacher. No teacher who was just going through the motions would put this much effort into making sure their classroom oozed this much positivity. The issue was that the Silver Spoon of her own time was a filly who didn't know what to do with her life, and one that she was expected to be give advice to in relation to that. Now that she had seen this, it would be hard not to push the filly in the direction of teaching (despite never showing a hint of interest in that career path to that point), or to feel so confident that things would work out for the filly that she didn't give Silver Spoon's fears and concerns the attention they really deserved. Just seeing this changed how she would act with Silver Spoon going forward, back in her own time. The same could be said of anypony she knew that she happened across while here. Being a teacher, she knew how much impact she could have on the lives of others, and she didn't want to have spoilers altering how she would do things. 

Just thinking of all of the uncomfortable knowledge she might gain made her knees shake. If twenty years had passed then her older students might actually be slightly older than she was supposed to be. Every student she had ever taught, except the classes younger than her most recent graduating class, would be older than she really was. How many of them were married with families? Statistically, most would probably have families of their own. For all she knew she was the foal of one of her current students, the same with Cheese. That was information she'd really rather not know in advance about her students, information nopony really had the right to know about ahead of time. How could she walk back into her class full of foals and not get uncomfortable knowing which of her students would end up with who, or what unexpected turns their lives may take? On a selfish note, she'd just be angry knowing who everypony else ended up with, but still be looking for Mr. Right herself. Things like that could make a mare bitter. 

The door opened, and Cheese came pronking into the room again, followed by a silver mare with large glasses. The silver mare's eyes immediately fell onto the mess of broken glass and liquids. "What under Twilight's sun and moon happened here?"

She didn't respond right away, the shock of seeing Silver Spoon as an adult was a lot to take in. The silver mare's glasses were still the first noticeable feature, which didn't seem so oversized on an adult. Her mane was still pulled back in a ponytail, but it was a bit more messy, rough, and flat than it had been when she was a filly. She still wore that same pearl necklace, which may be a family heirloom, but it gave her a hint of maturity rather than one of wealth. Between her accessories and her coloration, Silver Spoon actually appeared to be in her older forties, rather than younger thirties. Her clear face and vibrant eyes belied that notion, however. The most dramatic difference were Silver Spoon's eyes; no longer completely covered by her glasses, her eyes seemed so much bigger, and kinder at the same time. As a filly, she had an air of cynicism and haughtiness; there was no trace of that in this mare's face and demeanor. The changes were subtle, subtle enough that she easily recognized Silver Spoon, but dramatic enough it still seemed like a new pony. 

As Silver Spoon's eyes turned from the mess to her, she recognized the familiar gaze that she had likely given many a student in her own time right before she had given them detention. "Candy Apple!" Silver Spoon said sternly, eyes narrowing. "What is the meaning of this? Come over here, this instant, and let me look at your hooves to make sure you haven't stepped in glass and hurt yourself." There was more of a huskiness to the teacher's voice than what she had as a filly, with no trace of her foalhood inflections, perhaps the smallest hint of a rougher Manehatten accent.

Being in a foal's body, and hearing the voice of an adult authority figure, she found herself complying with her former student's order before she even realized what she was doing. She dutifully walked over to the teacher, avoiding the glass and debris, and sat down while holding up her forehooves for inspection. Silver Spoon carefully inspected each of her forehooves, and after finishing lifted each of her hind legs to inspect those hooves as well. The teacher let off a sigh of relief after she seemed satisfied that there was no injury. Her eyes went narrow and stern again afterwards, and seemed to burrow into the young filly that Cheerilee was currently occupying.

"I have been around long enough to recognize some of those things as potion supplies," Silver Spoon said, as she pointed a hoof at the mess. "Are you stealing from your aunt now? I can't imagine she would just give you those things. I know you have a penchant for tall tales, but theft is a type of delinquency that you've never done. What has gotten into you, young filly?"

She blinked a few times. She was an Apple, and taking an educated guess about who her aunt was wasn't hard if they were discussing potions from her. Cheese had mentioned a Ma and Pa Apple earlier, but it hadn't really clicked until now. That meant either Applejack or Big Mac was her parent. She hoped it wasn't Big Mac. She'd dated him briefly, and he was a very nice stallion, just never a good fit for her-- she longed for somepony a bit more conversational. Still, being in the body of the foal from a former boyfriend would somehow make this situation even more uncomfortable than it already was. 

Drawing herself up, she gazed into her former student's eyes. "I'm not who you think I am. I'm really Cheerilee, from twenty years ago. I need help to get back to my own time." Straight and to the point, that was the way to go.

Silver Spoon facehooved, and shook her head sadly. "Not this again." Again? What did she mean, again?

"She told me the same thing," Cheese confirmed, bouncing in place with the rubber chicken as a rider. "She said we need to find Zecora!"

Silver Spoon looked at the little androgen sadly. "Cheese, how many times are you going to be fooled by…" The teacher shook her head, and refocused on the yellow foal. "Never mind. Can you do me a big favor? Can you go to the School of Friendship and fetch Miss Applebloom for me? I don't know what all that stuff on the floor is, and I don't want me or anypony else being exposed to anything dangerous. She'll recognize what those things are and know how to properly deal with them."

Cheese saluted. "Sure thing, Miss Silver Spoon." The pony then pronked away and out the door. 

She couldn't stand it anymore, she had to ask. "Is Cheese a colt or a filly?"

Silver Spoon's head shot up and her ears flattened. "Candy, we had this talk." Then the mare shivered. "Oh Twilight's mercy, did we ever have this talk. I never want to have to deal with explaining that intersex is not a contagious disease to parents afraid to have their foals in the same classroom with him ever again.”  

Intersex? She'd heard of that, but never met anypony that she knew of that was.

Silver continued. “I've never seen Pinkie Pie get so upset as when those parents were saying such cruel things about her foal. You can just say ‘he’ with him, even if he will always have some feminine features. Please don't ask that again, it is not a subject for your games."

Most ponies would keep that a secret if they could, she supposed. That would explain why she couldn't tell what sex Cheese was, since he was technically both, even if ponies seemed to favor the male aspect of that. 

That was not really important, though it was nice to solve the mystery. What was important was convincing Silver Spoon that she was who she said she was. "I am Cheerilee, I can prove it. When you were getting ready to graduate my class twenty years ago you were really upset, and uncertain what to do. Diamond Tiara thought that you were mad at her because Diamond Tiara was planning to go off to business school in Manehatten. You and she used to pick on the Cutie Mark Crusaders for a few years you were in my class."

Silver Spoon looked down at her sadly. "I’m not sure how you learned that, but I have to give you credit, you certainly do your research for these stories each time." The mare reached out a hoof and laid it gently on Cheerilee's back. "You are such a bright and creative young filly, the effort and work that you put into these...stories... shows how bright and creative you really are. I just wish we could get you to channel it into something else."

She backed away from the teacher, shaking off the hoof, and shaking her head. "I really am Cheerilee! You can ask me anything to prove it."

"No, I know better," Silver Spoon sighed. "As I said, you do your research. I should have expected you to stick with this, after that full month you pretended to be possessed by King Sombra. You did all the research for that one too, and it took us forever to finally get you out of town hall after you claimed that as the capital of your new empire. That was after the month of pretending you had amnesia, and two months after pretending that you were a changeling stuck in the form of Candy Apple. You're an excellent actress, but no one is going to buy this story, so. Please. Just. Stop."

This couldn't be happening! Not only was she trapped in the body of a foal, twenty years in the future, but she was trapped in the body of the filly who seemed to Ponyville's most notorious liar! Probably claiming to be a mare who was dead, or at least missing, for twenty years! How was she supposed to get help if she couldn't convince even the ponies that should know her that she was who she said she was?

She laid down and covered her head with her forelegs, letting off a long groan of despair. "Oh boy."