The air is different.
Funny how that’s the first thing that I notice. Not that I’m suddenly outside on the opposite side of Ponyville or that the sun is a lot more eastward than the last time I saw it, but rather the sudden realization that Starlight’s lab had this weird odor that I only notice from its sudden absence.
Weird.
Still, back to the elephant in my pajamas. Outside now. Sun, moved. I don’t need a degree in temporal mechanics to put two and two together. Seriously though, it’s that easy? Just plunge and spin to unwind the cogs of time? Go fig.
That still leaves the problem of when I am. A problem that, luckily, has a very easy solution.
"Hey Lily!"
The nearby earth pony glances up from tending her garden. "Hm? Ah! Well good morning Colgate! Don’t usually see you up this early."
There goes my reputation. "Say, do you know the date?"
"The third."
"Great, thanks!"
"No problemo! You have a nice day."
And I’m back where I started. At least some things work out nice and cleanly. Tucking the Time Spoon into my pocket—best to keep a close eye on it till I can figure out what to do with it— I turn down a side road and head for home.
But despite the suddenly normal day I’ve been thrust back into, I can’t seem to stop my thoughts from drifting back to the strange object that weighs on my mind just as much as it does my pocket. Where did it come from? Who made it? And why had they given it to me?
What exactly had happened between taking a blow to the head and waking up in the hospital a month later?
Also the jacket, though that feels less important.
“I thought I made myself clear, no tomatoes on my sandwich!”
“S-Sorry, Miss!”
My attention is drawn, much like everyone else’s nearby, to an argument at a nearby café. Well, less an argument and more just a pegasus chewing out her server.
A rather familiar pegasus.
Raindrops.
I don’t consider myself a violent pony (and while several neighboring species seem to think ponies as a whole are incapable of anger, even among the generally pacifist there’s lies a spectrum of repressed hot tempers). However, the surging memory of that random act of violence makes me see red. Perhaps it was a month ago, but to me the memory is so fresh I can still feel the imprint of her horseshoe on my face.
I move without thinking, crossing the distance before I even realize I’ve moved. A blink later and I’m tapping her on the shoulder.
"Yeah?" Raindrops grumbles (on a pony scale, that’s practically a slur).
I riposte with a right hook. It’s clumsy and untrained (again, not a violent pony), but it makes solid contact with her temple all the same. She crumples like a sack of potatoes.
Somepony cries out and I glance up. I guess I’d been hoping to have public opinion on my side (saving the downtrodden service worker and all that) but it looks like more bystanders are, understandably, a little distraught at my sudden jump to violence. But their panicking wasn't what caught my attention and made by breath catch in my throat. No, that honor goes to the cerulean mare with the blue-and-white mane a few blocks down haggling with Carrot Top over the price of lunch.
Exactly as I remembered doing barely a few hours ago.
"Oh plaque, I'm early." I landed on the right day but the wrong hour. I’d applied my revenge before the original crime had even been committed. Which would make me the aggressor. Even worse, that means the hospital bill won't be covered by my insurance! I need to fix things before anypony blabs, but it’s not like I can un-punch someone.
Or can I?
"Wait a minute, I have a Time Spoon. I can just go back and stop myself from punching her in the first place!"
A fine plan, and one I’m quite proud of. Taking the Spoon out, I mimic my earlier actions as best as I can remember them. Spoon down, thrust, a few rapid counterclockwise turns. That feels right.
The wisps of red mist gather around me for a second and, just like before, the world around me vanishes before the bystanders can so much as ponder if a dentist would offer house calls while under house arrest.
I find myself in a dark and empty space, void of hope and light where time loses all meaning. Only this time it isn't Professor Incisor's damp, grey lecture hall, but rather a void in the more usual sense.
I float in nothingness, free from gravity. I could be moving infinitely fast or not at all; without a reference point there’s no way to tell. Black is still a color—it holds nuance and depth—but this is an abstraction of blackness. A true void of substance.
"Well." My voice falls flat and dead with perfect non-echo. "I think I may have overshot."
"[CONGRATULATIONS/PRAISE/HONOR]," booms a voice that is at once both infinitely loud yet sourceless, "To the first [PERSON/CREATURE/BEING] in the local sector to reach the required [SAPIENCE/MAGICAL/DEVELOPMENTAL] stage!"
Most ponies would have flinched or jumped at a sudden voice like a landslide of thunder, but I like to think I’m made of sterner stuff. Rather, my resilience is a forced evolution after an overheard comment about Discord's snaggletooth fang made me the focus of his pranking attention for the better part of a month. Jumpscares simply no longer cut the mustard.
The voice is so loud it feels like it should be painful, yet it isn’t. It’s not speaking Equestrian, yet I understand it, mostly. A few words drive a short spike of pain through my skull; shorts bursts of compressed meaning and concept packed far more densely than any normal type of speaking allows.
Being a practical sort, I turn around to hopefully face the speaker.
As it turns out, not all is void.
There’s also the sun. Big and yellow and roiling with cosmic fire and so close that it nearly fills my whole field of vision.
"[ADDITIONAL/SUPPLEMENTARY/AUXILIARY]," it continues in the same mechanically flat tone, "[CONGRATULATIONS/PRAISE/HONOR] on being the [SECOND] [SPECIES/RACE/LIFEFORM] to achieve this prior to the development of a local planet."
"Yep," I say quietly, "Definitely overshot."
"Yo. Whaddup?” intercedes a new voice, “You wanna make a contract?"
I squint against the brightness, which conveniently is not burning out my eyeballs. Between me and the Sun there’s now a third entity. It’s kind of like a cat, but somehow off, with soulful eyes and an intelligent smile that seems too big for its face. It vaguely resembles my elderly neighbor's pet, Mr. Whiskers. I dislike it immediately.
"A what?"
"A contract," it repeats. "You know, an agreement, an accord, a binding transfer of power between two beings?"
"I know what a contract is." A little undercurrent of anger helps me power through the sheer oddity of the situation.
"Cool beans. It'd be a real mess if the first good applicant turned out to be an idiot."
What a prick. Then again, it is a cat so what else did I expect? I just wish I had something to throw at it like I would Mr. Whiskers. But, alas, the void is free from helpful clutter.
"So, contract?" it offers again.
I eye it skeptically. I learned a hard lesson about contracts last time Flim and Flam were in town. "Contract for what?"
"Possession of the Sun," it replies all too casually. "Big ball of plasma over there? You get complete and total magical control over it—including tying your lifespan to it’s, which is totes freebie subjective immortality—in exchange for a few small concessions. Nothing major, just trivial stuff really. So..." Its smile seems to widen even further, "You wanna control the Sun?"
I considered it. I definitely did. The words entered my mind, bounced against a few concepts and ideas, and tried to squeeze themselves into some sort of justification framework. By any definition, I most assuredly did think about it.
It just didn't take me very long to reach a decision.
"Buck no!"
The cat-thing doesn’t reel from my outburst, but it does cock its head to the side. "You don't desire power?"
"Course I do, who doesn't? But I'd have to be some kind of idiot not to see the drawbacks you're trying to sneak on me. If I controlled the sun, that means I'd have to get up every morning before sunrise to lift it. Tartar, it'd be literally impossible for me to sleep in! No thanks buster brown, you can take your contract and shove it. I'm out!"
With a swift gesture that’s quickly becoming familiar, I whip out my Time Spoon and give it a rapid clockwise spin. And with a silent burst of blue fog, I disappear.
The first thing I notice about Ponyville is how quiet it is. Never has the bustling little town felt so empty before. Every building is abandoned and run-down, monuments of peeling paint and broken glass to a populace gone missing. It’s the most depressing thing I’ve seen since the last time Cherry Berry’s flirt of a coltfriend publicly begged her to take him back. He was crying and everything.
"Celestia's Cavity-filled Molars!" I feel the swear is entirely deserved given the circumstances. I give the Time Spoon a death glare. "Stupid thing overshot me again! Some fancy piece of magitech you are. When I get home you're gonna be used for soup and that's it!"
But before I spin it backwards, I hesitate. There’s no need to be hasty. I might as well take a bit to explore this warped version of home. I’ve got time, after all. Maybe I’ll find some useful information that’ll help me out back in the present.
“So, I guess this is an apocalypse then?” I don’t really expect a response but, hey, if there is one, talking to somepony will make things go a lot faster. “Am I gonna find zomponies? Slavers? Irradiated survivors? I bet their teeth are terrible. Nopony ever takes care of their teeth during an apocalypse.”
Despite my jabs into the proverbial dark, the town remains totally silent. There’s a few animals about, mostly eating overgrown gardens, but they all ignore me. Which is fine. I never cared much for animals either.
I make it all the way to the town square before I find any signs of intelligent life. Though the intelligent factor of it is still up for debate.
Either the whole town was cursed and transformed living furniture like in that old foal’s tale, or else some survivor raided every nearby house for its furnishings and converted the plaza into the ultimate expression of open floor plan living.
“Hello?” I venture, “Anypony alive in there?”
“Aha! At last! Ding ding ding! I’ve got mail!”
The sound of hoofbeats meander out from somewhere in the maze-like corridors followed by what I’m pretty sure is the sound of a wardrobe falling over.
“I’m okay!” The voice replies. “Trixie just knocked over an armoire! Bad Trixie! I told you to be careful in my lab!”
Armoire, wardrobe. Close enough.
The voice—which is familiar in a way I can’t quite place—keeps chattering on as I work my way towards it.
“It’s about time you arrived. We’ve been waiting for these samples for absolutely ages. Why, it’s almost three o’clock! We’re going to have to hurry if we’re going to make lunch! Maybe we’ll make it a working lunch. We can work while we lunch and lunch while we work. How ingenious! Trixie! Write that one down!”
At the center of the maze lies the scavenged remains of every appliance and magical device in Ponyville. Refrigerators, ovens, blenders, everything down to the wind-up alarm clocks has been gathered here and stripped down for parts, a lot of which look like they’ve been shuffled and recombined into an army of mechanical Friesianstein’s monsters. Some glow, some hum, some buzz. All of them look very sciencey in a very shoestring-budget sort of way.
Standing in the midst of it all is a mare who looks awfully different to the last time I saw her.
Starlight Glimmer looks terrible, no two ways about it. Her fur is grimey, her mane streaked with more gray than I remember, and there’s something really unsettling about her jittery eyeballs that never rest on any one thing for more than a second.
She’s also wearing a jacket surprisingly similar to mine.
“Derpy! You’ve finally arrived!” She cheers though she’s looking at me. “You got me the samples from Canterlot?”
“Uh, no, not quite.” Well that’s certainly unexpected. “It’s me. Colgate. We spoke… actually, I’m not sure how long ago it was for you.”
Her smile remains strained though her eye twitches. “Colgate? No, Colgate was evacuated along with the rest. Isn’t that right Trixie?”
I turn to where she’s looking, expecting to find another pony. There’s not. Instead there’s just a jumbo bottle rocket with a bottle of bourbon and a crudely drawn face taped to it.
Starlight laughs and blushes. “Oh Trixie you scamp! Not in front of company.” She leans in to me, completely disregarding all common laws of personal space. “She is such a rascal when she’s squiffy. Don't tell her, but I'm also seeing Sunburst on the side." She indicates her head towards a large potted croton wearing a starry cape. "But he can be a little prickly, so it would never work out between us long term. Oh! Derpy! When did you get here?”
Clearly, Starlight is no longer playing with a full deck. And if the weathering on ‘Trixie’ is any sign, she’s been this way for a while. Looks like the only way to find out anything is to play along with her delusions. “Yeah, it’s me… Derpy.” There’s no way she believes this. “The pegasus.” I have a horn for Celestia’s sake!
“And my most loyal assistant!” Starlight agrees readily. “Not that I have many other assistants. It’s so hard to find good help these days. Everypony just wants to laze about and eat other ponys’ sourdough starters!” She shoots ‘Trixie’ a glare.
Deluded or not, it looks like she’s going to be my only source of answers. “Starlight, what happened here? Where is everypony?”
She turns and looks at me, and for a moment I swear a see a glimmer of lucidity behind her eyes. “Where? Evacuated, of course. Years ago to keep them safe from the sickness. Off through every mirror Twilight could cough up.”
The mirror part I chalk up to her mental instability, but the other half feels ominously important. “Sickness?”
“Obviously. That ghastly pseudo-magical affliction that swept across the world a decade ago. Wiped out nearly everything in its path.” She walks over to one of her many machines and opens it, fiddling with the wires and crystals within. “Not many of us left now, just the odd hundred or so it left untouched. The source of our immunity still eludes me.”
This is getting a lot heavier than I expected. Monsters, tyrants, ancient magical forces, those are just a Tuesday in Ponyville. But a rampaging sickness? That’s a whole other type of scary. “Did they… die?”
Her head jerks out of the machine, her horn banging loudly on the rim, not that she seems to notice. “What? No!”
I breathe a sigh of relief. That’s at a small comfort at least.
“They all transformed into harmless plants and mindless woodland creatures.”
Oh. That’s… less of a relief. So all those rabbits and birds about town earlier… how many of them had once been ponies? Ponies I knew?
“It wasn’t supposed to happen, you know!” Starlight calls from her nest of wires she’s gotten wrapped around herself. “The sickness. Shouldn’t have been. It’s artificial. Somepony went and made it. But they weren’t supposed to! This whole timeline is wrong. I started detecting the time ripples right when the first cases started appearing.”
I freeze. Time? Had… I somehow caused this? By punching Raindrops early? By turning down a contract with the Sun? How could either of those butterfly into a magical plague of all things?!
“That’s why I built this!” Suddenly, Starlight’s muzzle is inches from my own, once again wearing that manic grin. She also has something held aloft in her magic. A silver spoon, half-covered with runic engravings and missing a familiar fat ruby. “I call it a Time Spoon. It’s based off notes I took on a similar device years ago. Not quite ready yet, but I have a plan for when it is.”
I can feel a light dawning. She may not have a finished Time Spoon, but I do. This could be my chance to fix things. “And what is your plan?”
“Quite forgetful today, aren’t you Derpy? As you know, I played fast and loose with time magic in my youth, so I can’t manage the trip myself. So when it’s ready, you take the Spoon, go back to the day the sickness was released, figure out who’s responsible for releasing it, and then give them this.” She pulls out a small bottle of red liquid from a pocket. “I call this plague-in-a-jar, restricted, copyrighted, trademarked. It’s the sickness; painstakingly harvested, cultivated, and weakened to a fraction of its original potency. The original, well, you know as well as I what it can do, but this version won’t result in anything worse than a bad cold.”
“Why can’t she-” No, wait, I’m Derpy at the moment. “-Why can't I just stop them from releasing the virus in the first place?”
Starlight shakes her head so vigorously that a few more strands of mane escape their already haphazard arrangement. “Too late for that! It’s in the timestream! If you remove the virus, then it creates a paradox by removing the need to remove it. History demands there be a virus now. The most we can do is nudge it back on course with a weakened strain.” She sighs and sits down hard, easing down from her manic level of energy. “Of course, the plan won’t work until I can get this Spoon finished.”
Well, it’s not a great plan, but it’s something. At least it has a chance of actually succeeding since I’m here instead of whatever mailbox she’s decided is Derpy. I guess it’s up to me to fix this and save the world. Won’t that be fun to tell Pinkie about at her next appointment? Only one problem though.
“Hypothetically, when the Time Spoon is finished, how would you make it travel to one particular day?”
Starlight brightens. “Oh! Good point Derpy. I suppose I could inscribe a psychic interface. Let the user’s thoughts guide it. Easy enough with Trixie’s help.” She shoots a winning smile to her explosive stand-in.
I resist the urge to smack someone. Either her for not telling me this back before I left, or myself for not figuring it out on my own. Psychic link, of course. Had to be something painfully obvious like that. How else am I supposed to control something with no buttons or knobs?
Meanwhile Starlight’s run off, back to one of her machines that’s now on fire. A fire she’s eagerly fanning. Apparently it’s supposed to do that. And she’s left the weakened virus just sitting on the table. How careless of her.
In my pocket it goes.
“Bye Starlight,” I say softly. “See you in the future. Or, rather, the past. Alternate future-past? You know what? Forget it.”
Focusing my mind on the idea of ‘the day the sickness was released’, I plunge my spoon and give it a solid counterclockwise turn. The wispy red mist barely takes a second to form this time before I’m gone.