//------------------------------// // Prelude // Story: Twilight Steals a Watch // by Stygius Nix //------------------------------// Ever since she was a little filly, Twilight had been obsessed with time. It wasn’t that she found herself lacking in it but it was the power it held over… well everything; from deciding if she had to skip breakfast to get to school on time or creating the very mountain she, and the rest of Canterlot, lived on. It was all a matter of time. That’s why she spent most of her free time learning about time, as well as her other studies and passions. Twilight eagerly read through countless books on theories about time, spells and incantations that dabbled in the subject — she even read comic books about time, her favourite being ‘The Mare Who Could Stop Time’. Twilight bounced around the family living room as she morphed into a blurry purple ball of excitement, and nearly becoming an ornament on the tree when she opened her Hearth’s Warming gift on the eve of the holiday — as was the family tradition. Her parents had gotten her a platinum pocket watch with a family photo of all of them giving cheesy grins on the inside of the lid. Twilight was loved by her family. Like all of their daughter’s passions, Night Light and Velvet encouraged this seemingly harmless obsession. They always beamed at the sight of their young Twilight gazing into the pocket watch, knowing that no matter where she is she’ll always have their support. So when Twilight was taken on as Princess Celestia’s personal student at eleven years old, her parents were completely fine with letting their baby girl fledge the nest to live in a disused observatory at Canterlot Castle. They still got to see her on important holidays and, since Night Light worked as the lead intelligence officer for the Royal Guard and Twilight Velvet worked as vice-head of staff at the castle, they often bumped into Twilight roaming the halls with her face in a book. At that time their beloved son, Shining Armour, started full-time training at the castle barracks so they all got to see each other frequently. As the years strolled by, Twilight accumulated more and more possessions for her solitary abode. On her sixteenth birthday, Twilight received a rather generous gift from her immortal mentor. The Sun Goddess had commissioned a sculptor to create an hourglass the size of herself from the frog of her hoof to the tip of her ivory horn. After becoming a tad lighter in the royal pocket, Celestia wove some of her magic into the hourglass. Twilight was left baffled by the gift, leading her to implore how it worked; as much as she adored the Princess, she didn’t exactly feel a lot of gratitude for an hourglass that didn’t work. With a wink, Celestia merely responded by telling her to figure it out. It was a relief to know that Celestia had combined two of Twilight’s greatest hobbies — time and puzzles; her third being heists. It took her a month and five days to discover the true power of the glass due to the complex spellwork of Princess Celestia. Despite the difficulties she encountered, she found that the hourglass would foreshadow things yet to come. One of Spike’s duties was to watch over the hourglass when Twilight wasn’t in — it sometimes helped him by showing him if Twilight would be mad if he ate too much ice cream, sometimes. One of the reasons why Twilight loved her mentor so much was that she controlled time in a way because she raised the Sun and Moon to cycle through the days. Furthermore, she didn’t have to bow down to time because she was immortal; time was merely an inconvenience to the Solar Monarch. However, what she loved most about the mare was that she still used the most of it to help her student and her citizens. Two years after her sweet sixteen, Twilight had discovered the prophecy of Nightmare Moon and the stars aiding in her escape. However, despite her mentor shutting down her fears and telling her to go to Ponyville to check on the Summer Sun Celebration preparations, Twilight consulted the hourglass a final time before she left. But the sound of Spike crashing to the floor distracted her and she failed to notice the image of a dark mare in the hourglass, when she turned back around the illusion was already gone. From then on, it was history. The next nine years of her life had many unexpected adventures with time: meeting her future self and then accidentally creating a time loop, becoming immune to the physical effects of time when she ascended, looking back in time through a potion to see the making of history, travelling through different timelines to save her own. It was not surprising that her love of time grew less and less over the years, but it was still something Twilight took great interest in. Everything led her to this moment. Twilight Sparkle was sat on her sofa staring in wondrous awe at the — recently spat on — second page of the Foal Free Press. Behind the streaking hot coffee stains read: New one-of-a-kind watch to be displayed at Canterlot’s ‘Stuff Celestia Can Never Get Her Shiny Metal Hoof Shoes On’ (most ponies will know this place as ‘Celestia’s Bottom’) this Saturday at 11:30! This magical watch is truly special because it doesn’t need magic, a battery, or winding up, it just works. But, the most noteworthy ability of this watch is that it has an absurdly detailed compass around the face that points towards whatever pops into the wearer’s mind. So, if you want to go to the toilet, the compass will point you towards the nearest public toilets. This would allow even non-magic users to use a type of divination spell. While incredibly useful, it could be equally as dangerous in the wrong hooves. This is why the watch shall be placed in a magic proof display case, guarded by seven of Equestria’s secret service dropouts. In other news, Princess Celestia and Princess Luna were found intoxicated at Canterlot Park in the early hours of yesterday morning. Eyewitnesses claim to have seen the two deities fighting each other with uprooted trees while they jousted on the backs of swan boats. The Princesses were last seen being swept off the mountain by Canterlot’s Great White Waterfall. Large detachments of the Royal Guard have been sent to — Twilight stopped reading and launched explosively from the couch towards her planning room. A mad determined grin ripped at Twilight’s pudgy purple cheeks as she began to plan for the weekend. That weekend, Twilight Sparkle shall be heisting Celestia’s Bottom… or whatever it was called.