//------------------------------//
// Radio 
// Story: Transmission Spectrum 
// by FanOfMostEverything 
//------------------------------//

Sunset woke up, which was the first sign that something had gone horribly wrong. Sleep was a luxury she could rarely enjoy these days, and she definitely didn't remember indulging last night. "The crap?" she muttered.

The second sign was that she didn't recognize her surroundings. Rather than the privacy screen-partitioned part of her warehouse home she'd designated as her bedroom, she lay on a queen-sized bed looking out at the top half of a two-story window. "The crap?"

The third sign, which she noticed the moment she sat up, was she didn't feel anything beyond the usual five human senses. No finger on the pulse of the universe, no faint sussurus of unwanted prayer, no connection to the vast mass of her power and mind devoted to holding the universe together. Not even the sixth sense she'd been born with, the thaumoception she'd regained along with her everyday magic.

As a worm of dread slithered through her stomach, Sunset brought a hand to her forehead.

Smooth, unbroken skin.

"The actual TARTARUS!?"





Sunset would later insist that what followed was not panicking. Panic was flailing about pointlessly. This flailing clarified a number of important points.

One, breathing was mandatory again. Fortunately, her body handled that on its own; ditto heartbeat, blinking, et al.

Two, she had all the magical capacity of a dust bunny, and no amount of straining mind or soul could so much as make a spark, much less discorporate her body and manifest something with a proper headgem.

Three, as the window suggested, the loft was a two-level affair. Corollary to three, the stairs had no banister, and falling down them while whinnying every Equish curse Sunset could remember hurt. It also did wonders for making her focus on actually doing something constructive.

"Okay," she said once she'd made sure she hadn't broken anything. "Okay. Let's review. And talk to myself, apparently. I have no magic. I'm fully human and material. I'm in a weird apartment..." She took in the gaming set-up, the open takeout containers, the empty bottle of Silky Mane shampoo in a wastebasket. "But one that definitely seems like I live in it. So, what now? What resources do I have at my disposal? My friends. Princess Twilight." She flipped a light switch, making several strings of Yuletide lights strung along the second-floor railing offer faint illumination. "Electricity, and hopefully the Internet. Finances uncertain, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. Point is, we have options, Sunset. We can figure this out."

The pep talk wasn't quite as helpful when she couldn't manifest a second body to deliver it, but Sunset still felt prepared to tackle the challenge.

"Now where in the name of Celestia's cake-fattened rump is anything?"

Mostly prepared.

A somewhat less frantic search followed, and Sunset eventually tracked down the journal. Which was under her bed. She felt unreasonably proud of herself for not shouting and throwing it out of that very nice, very large window, or the smaller one over the bed.

Doubly so when it turned out the quantumantic artifact which was supposed to produce an indefinite number of pages on demand was somehow full.

Sunset felt an eyelid twitch as she mentally moved "Conspiracy to drive me insane" up a few ranks in her inner list of potential explanations for what was going on.

After a deep breath, she found her phone on the nightstand, and that at least was familiar. As was her unlock code. "Hey Gillion, round up the girls. We have a situation."

"I'm sorry," her phone said in far more vacant tones than she'd expected, "I didn't get that."

The dread returned, and it brought friends. Sunset gulped. "Gillion?"

The phone binged expectantly. After a few seconds, with the exact same inflection, it said, "I'm sorry, I didn't get that."

Sunset didn't want to say it. Saying it would make it real. But she had to be sure. "You aren't self-aware, are you?"

"Well, I'm soft-aware."

A chill ran down her spine. She wasn't sure if it was more comforting or terrifying to know she wasn't the only one out of sorts. After a deep breath, she unlocked the phone and said, "All right, group text."




The Girls


now SS: Major emergency. We need to talk ASAP.




The responses came almost immediately.



PP: Meet up at Sugarcube Corner! 5s ago

RD: 1st! now



Sunset smiled as other confirmations came in, some of the anxious weight coming off her shoulders... though a bit settled back on when she had to look up directions to the cafe from her current, unknown address. She turned out to be within walking distance, on a familiar street in a neighborhood that had been way out of her price range when she'd first been looking for shelter in this world.

"Well, if nothing else, I have some good real estate tips for later." Sunset took a deep breath, then stiffened her resolve. And also her back. "We're going to fix this," she told herself. She opened the door...

Only to be met with a faceful of windblown snow. She flinched back, gasping, spitting, and immediately colder than she'd been for months. She slammed the door shut against the late December morning and turned back around.

"Okay. Jacket," she said as she made for the closet. "Jacket, and then we fix this."





Sunset came to appreciate the scope of the change as she made her way through the blustery weather. Oh, sure, every unicorn aspect might be wearing a hood. The earthen could all be wearing gloves, the assorted fliers scarves. But no one was flying. Pedestrian traffic going three-dimensional had been one of the first and most persistent changes Canterlot had seen after the change. Walk signals were for people who couldn't fly and didn't have friends who could airlift them. Or they were yesterday.

But even more than that, no one recognized her. No one stopped to stare at Sunset Shimmer brought low and walking among the mortals. No one approached her with a desperate prayer, or a camera poised to feed social media's endless hunger for candid shots of the Bacon Horse. She was pretty sure an entire sect of Shimmerism revolved around upvoting anything with her in it.

Or it had.

She wasn't sure how to feel about the idea of not being worshiped anymore. For all that she groused about it, it was nice to feel respected, especially without having to bully anyone into it. Still, this was the first time in months that she felt remotely norma—

"Oof!"

"Sorry!" she said.

The man she'd walked into just rolled his eyes as he moved around her. "Watch it next time."

Okay, there was such a thing as overcompensation.

Sunset still hadn't resolved how she felt  by the time she walked into Sugarcube Corner. The place was mostly empty; the usual morning rush wasn't factor between Yuletide and New Year's.

"Sunset!" That didn't stop Pinkie from waving so quickly that her entire forearm was a pink blur. "Over here!"

She returned a much more conservative wave and sat next to Rainbow Dash. "Hey, girls. Sorry if I'm intruding on your break, Pinkie."

Pinkie giggled at that. "Don't worry, silly. How could I even be here if I were working today? Unless I skated all the way here from the mall..." Pinkie gasped. "Sunset Shimmer, you're a genius!"

Sunset tried to factor that into her analysis of the situation and, as was often the case with Pinkie, found she had no idea what to do with it. "You know what, I'm not even going to question that."

"So," said Dash, having turned her chair around and leaning on the back, "what's the emergency?"

Sunset shook her head. "I'd rather wait until we're all here. But it's big."

As if on cue, the door rang open again. Pinkie waved. "Hi, Rarity! Hi, Fluttershy!"

"Hello, everyone," Rarity said as she sat. "Now, whatever is the matter?"

"Is it Equestrian magic?" said Fluttershy.

Sunset blinked. Wait, what?

Dash rolled her eyes. "Of course it's Equestrian magic! What else could it be?"

"Ooh!" Pinkie beamed and took in a great gulp of air. "What if the government finally noticed all of the supernatural events in town and sent a bunch of unmarked vans to conspicuously park outside all our homes, but Sunset accidentally brushed up against her new mailman who's actually one of the deep cover agents and now she going to warn us about how we're all getting carted off to an undisclosed location?"

"Um... No," said Sunset. "Not that."

Pinkie leaned back in her chair and wiped her brow. "Well that's a relief. I'm trying not to blow up more government property after that time at the post office."

"When did—"

"And it would be difficult for Sunset to detect such devious schemes without her geode," said Rarity. Sunset's wha— "Whyever aren't you wearing it, darling?"

Dash nodded and held up a blue stone on a necklace. Was that— "Yeah. No telling when something crazy's gonna happen."

Sunset held up her hands, mind spinning. "Could... could we just slow down for a minute?"

"Sunset?" Fluttershy reached over and put a hand on her shoulder, a concerned look in her eyes. "Is everything alright?"

"No. Everything is not alright. And the more I see and hear, the more I think nothing is alright. Even since I woke up this morning, the entire world has..." Sunset trailed off as a thought struck her. She pulled out her phone, went to the photos, and started scrolling through them. All of them.

After the Battle of the Bands, she didn't recognize a single one.

"Sunset?"

"Sunset? You good?"

Sunset absently shook her head. "What the actual..."

"Helloooo? Ground control to Major Shim? Your circuit's dead, connection's dim."

"Sunset, darling, please, speak to us. What has you so upset?"

"I-it's..." Sunset's head started to swim. Right. She didn't need to breathe that much. A paper bag popped into her peripheral vision. "Thanks, Pinkie." Once her blood oxygen was back under control, she said, "It's a lot to go through, and I'd still rather wait for Twilight and Applejack."

"Well, we'll be waiting for some time," said Rarity. "I doubt they've left the farm; they were working on something..." She spun a hand for a few moments. "Farmy. And mechanical. But saying everything's gone wrong and not telling us anything else doesn't help anyone, it just worries the rest of us along with you."

"When I say a lot to go through, I mean it. So much is different and no one else seems to notice."

"Like what?" said Fluttershy.

"The fact you can even ask..." Sunset shook her head. "I'm starting to consider time travel as a possibility."

Pinkie gasped. "You mean like the time loop you undid during the Star Swirled Music Festival?"

Sunset stared at her for a few moments, hoping she might make more sense. She stubbornly remained Pinkie Pie. "I'm sorry, the what I what during the what?"

"You know, the one where we got to perform with Su-Z and K-Lo after you broke the Time Twirler?"

"You keep saying these things like I'm going to understand them."

Pinkie flinched back and gasped in horror. "Oh my gumdrops, you don't remember PostCrush!?"

A vague memory of pop culture news wriggled in the back of Sunset's mind. "Hang on. K-Lo as in Kiwi Lollipop? I thought she went solo years ago."

"You truly have been living a nightmare." Pinkie grabbed Sunset in a bear hug. 

Sunset kept talking around and through the mass of pink trying to consume her head. "This may be further evidence. Ripple effects. Discrepancies in memory. We need to find a divergence point..." She managed to spot her phone on the table through the curls. "Of course! After the fight with the sirens—"

Pinkie pulled back. "You mean the one at the Battle of the Bands, or when you and Aria got into a shouting match at Star Swirled?"

After a beat, Sunset said, "The Battle. After that, did any of you notice any tattoos where you didn't have any before?"

Most of the others just stared at her. Dash gave a low whistle. "Dang. What kind of after-party did we have in your timeline?"

"The magic didn't build." Sunset's gaze moved to Dash's necklace. "Or at least not as quickly. Did..." She looked down at her own hands. "Could I have changed something retroactively? But if my memories don't match yours, if I remember the way things were, why can't I remember what I did?"

"Do you think Wallflower might know something about this?" said Fluttershy.

Sunset looked up and blinked. "Who?"

That got her a full set of scowls, even from Pinkie. Fluttershy said, "That's not funny, Sunset."

"What do you— Oh. Oh!" Sunset winced. "Yeah, that was in poor taste. Did she not transfer to Ravnica High early in the year?"

That got a full set of blank looks. Pinkie spoke for the group. "What High?"

Sunset frowned "Ravnica? You know, the town twenty minutes south of us? The Fighting Froghemoths? Their gym teacher's been trying to get Rainbow to transfer since sophmore year."

Dash crossed her arms, brow furrowed in thought. "I mean, I am awesome, but I don't remember playing any Froghemoths. Which is a shame, 'cause froghemoths sound awesome."

"You don't remember because there is no such town," said Rarity.

"Wait, really?" Sunset's brought a hand to her head as she thought, her other hand sketching vague shapes along the table. "Time travel that could erase an entire town should've rendered this one unrecognizable."

"Hang on," said Dash, "why do you think you did something to change history?"

"That's a big part of the long story. I—"

"Howdy, y'all!"

Sunset looked up to see Applejack walk up to the table. Along with an even more welcome sight. "So sorry we're late," said Twilight. "Several components of that engine block had rusted together until they'd fused. So, what manner of—"

It had been a long day, and Sunset hadn't even been up for an hour. She felt she could be forgiven for all but pouncing on her girlfriend once she saw her.

But out of all the signs of something gone terribly wrong, this was the most terrible of them all. Twilight often hesitated to initiate more physical displays of affection, but she warmed to them quickly. Yet this kiss began at "dead fish" and only got worse from there.

Sunset pulled back the moment she realized that, seeing her friend—only, at best, perhaps still her friend—stare back at her in shock and confusion.

Sunset's first impulse was to make her body vanish through sheer force of will. When that didn't work, she said, "Oh. That's different too. Good to know. I'm going to go cry now."

And she spun around, pivoting on the pit in her stomach, and walked into the bathroom to do just that.