I was right to trust my gut.
Because I’m back in the future… and it looks the exact same as the last time I saw it.
Same abandoned houses, same wild grazing animals, same maze of stolen furniture and cobbled together technology.
It didn’t work. Starlight’s big plan to fix everything did not work.
And I know just who to complain to about it.
“Starlight!” I yell as I cut straight to the heart of the maze. She looks up from a worktable as I arrive. Derpy’s there too this time, hovering behind her with an extra tool in each hoof. The unicorn pushes aside a welding mask and gives me a curious look.
“Derpy?” She asks. “How are you over there? I thought you were right behind me.” She looks behind her to Derpy. “You are right behind me. Well this is new.”
I’m in no mood for games, not now. Not after the failure. “I’m not Derpy, I’m Colgate and your plan failed.”
“My plan?”
“Yes, your plan,” I echo, “To go back in time with the Time Spoon and replace the sickness with a weak version. It didn’t. Work.”
The mare looks truly confused now while Derpy’s just gone silent and still. “But… I haven’t tried my plan yet. I’ve only just now finished my Time Spoon.” She holds up what she’s been working on. It’s a Time Spoon alright. A perfect replica of mine.
“I know. I used mine.” I stomp over to them and slam my Spoon onto the table, making a matched mirrored set. “I went back and I made sure they got the weak strain and yet this bleak future is still here. Why is it still here Starlight?”
“I… I don’t understand.” Starlight sits down hard, her tools falling with her as her aura fails. “My plan… it was foolproof. Nudge the timeline back. Make a new flu, not a transformative sickness. It couldn’t have failed.”
“Well it did,” I practically spit. I know I’m being irrational but I’m too angry to care. The world is still apocalypsed and it’s still somehow maybe my fault and my one shot at fixing it just fell out from beneath me like a house of cards. “I stepped in for the original courier and made sure that the sample Derpy gave me was delivered instead of whatever was supposed to.”
“Sample Derpy gave you?” Starlight still looks confused but there’s something different about it. “What sample did Derpy give you?”
“After I… lost the first bottle of weakened virus, I came back here to the future and Derpy gave me another one. Why are you shaking your head? You weren’t there.”
This only makes her shake harder and her pupils are starting to do that twitchy thing again. “No, that’s impossible. I only made one sample of the weakened strain. Derpy, what did you give her?”
“Exactly what I needed. Yoink!” Before either of us can react, the pegasus darts in and grabs my Time Spoon off the table before flying up and out of our reach.
“What are you doing?” Starlight cries at the same time I yell, “Give that back it’s mine!”
“Hope you don’t mind I’m taking the tried and tested model,” she comments as though she’s merely borrowing a pair of hedge clippers. “Don’t want to have to work out any bugs in Starlight’s version.”
“Why are you doing this?” Starlight pleads. I stick with the classic, “Give it back!”
Derpy only sneers. It looks so wrong on her face, and that makes it all the more frightening. “I’ll answer your questions in order. What did I give her? The sickness. Pure and strong and unaltered. What am I doing? Right now I’m heading back in time to write a few notes for my younger self. Just some pick-up and drop-off locations. I was rather trusting back then, delivering anything anypony asked of me. Why? Well that’s the big one isn’t it?” She sighs, and for a moment there's a hint of sadness in her eyes. “I don’t really have to tell you, but I’ll let you know it was all to keep Dinky safe. Good luck stopping me; I know you’ll fail cause it’s already happened and I’ve already succeeded.”
With a quick flick of her wrist and a swirl of my Spoon, red mist obscures her form. When it dissipates a moment later, she’s gone.
Starlight and I are left stunned on the ground below.
“Derpy’s behind all this?” It’s so ridiculous I have to say it out loud just to make sure I’m not imagining things.
“I- but she was my assistant.” Starlight’s voice is so quiet, so broken, I barely hear her. “She helped me with everything. Isolating the sickness, cultivating it. She even encouraged me to pursue my crazy plan with the… Time… Spoon.” She goes completely silent. “I played right into her hooves, didn’t I? Everything she did, it was all leading up to this. So she could go back and cause this whole catastrophe to happen.”
Go back. Her words echo in my mind.
No, it’s not over left. She may have taken my Spoon, but it’s not the only one available anymore.
“Give me the Spoon,” I state. At least I have the courtesy to not steal it like she did.
“What?”
“Give me. The Time Spoon.” I repeat, my hoof outstretched and ready. “I’ll go back and stop her. Or something.”
Starlight shakes her head. “You can’t. She’s right. We’ve already failed. The sickness happened, which means she’s succeeded.”
“Time can be rewritten. I know cause I remember a time without a sickness. Not even your weakened version.”
She hesitates. I can see the ideas bouncing through her head like billiard balls after a break. Then she begins to smile. It’s small and strained, but it’s there. A tiny ray of hope piercing through the clouds of her depression. “Yes. Yes, if that’s true then we might just have a chance.” She presses the newly crafted Spoon into my hooves. “I’ll give you the crash course. First thing you need to know, there’s a psychic interface-”
“I know,” I interrupt, before giving her a small smile. “You based this one on mine, remember?”
“That’s right, I did. That’ll save us precious time. It hasn’t been long, the Time Spoon should be able to track her chronometric wake before it dissipates. Go then! Go and fix what I couldn’t!”
I nod and cup my hoof around the new Spoon. It’s still warm from whatever magical etching process she did to it, and the spellwork seems to practically jerk and buck against my magical field like a rambunctious colt eager to be let out of school so he can go play. I’m all too happy to oblige it, giving it a counter clockwise spin and a direction.
Bring me to Derpy!
Ponyville again, once more filled with ponies, but there’s only one I’m interested in.
“Derpy!” Who cares if anyone hears me cause a scene now? Time can handle a few tiny ripples so long as I fix the big one.
“What? Who’s there?” I track the sound to a spot above me. There she is! Flying by, calm as you like, hooves full with a box three times her size. Is this another part of her evil scheme?
“Drop that now and get over here!” I doubt she’ll actually listen to anything I have to say but—
WHUUMP!
She drops the box like it growled at her, letting it fall at least five stories till it crash lands on somepony’s roof with an impact that sends dust flying. A moment after it lands she gingerly sets down beside me. “Hi. Who are-”
“I don’t have time for your games! What’s your plan with the sickness and how do I stop it?”
“Sickness?” she asks, trying to play innocent with her doe eyes and curious head tilt.
But I’m not falling for it.
“Yes!” I press, getting angry at her stalling. “The sickness that you created and stole and spread! The one you said was all to protect Dinky!”
“Dinky!?” she gasps, “I don’t understand? What’s wrong with Dinky? Is my baby okay? The nursery said she’d be fine for a couple hours so I could take my shift!”
Her words make me pause. Baby? No, that’s not right. Dinky’s been one of my patients for more than seven years. The brief lull in my anger lets me see clearly for a moment. Derpy is young. Way younger than I just saw. She’s barely a legal adult. Realization hits me like a sledgehammer.
I’m early. Again.
“Plaque! Wait, okay, um, forget all this!” I wave my hooves in front of her face like I’m some kind of hypnotist. “This is… a dream! You’re asleep! So just forget you ever met me and anything I just said about you releasing a plague.”
She stares at me, conflicted for a moment, before smiling. “Okay strange pony. Boy am I sure glad this is a dream. My boss would chew my ear off if I actually dropped that mattress. Bye now, I’m gonna go find a tree that grows muffins.”
As easy as that, she wanders away, humming a little tune. It’s astounding how such a sweet mare could have gone so sour. What happens to her in the parts of future I haven’t seen?
Anyway, I need to get back on track. I take out the Spoon and stare it down. I’m betting a psychic connection means a lot more than just giving it a destination. “Now you listen here, you cut-rate cutlery. No more of this monkey’s paw misinterpretations. You take me to when I want to go, or so help me I’m going to melt you down and pour you on Dinky’s baby horseshoes. Capiche?”
I have no idea if my threats accomplished anything. I don’t speak Spoon.
I push it down and give it a spin, this time explicitly focusing on 'Take me to the Derpy that has the other Time Spoon'. The blue mist closes over me so quickly I barely see it.
The world resolves around me in a field of blue. Less a field really and more an expanse.
It’s the sky.
A second later gravity reasserts itself and I start falling.
After only a split second of free-falling I hit something that yelps and starts to fall with me. As we tumble I see a flash of grey feathers. Derpy. Stupid Spoon brought me to her alright. Smack dab on top of her in the middle of the air!
“Get off of me!” she yells, “You’ll make us both crash!”
And how exactly am I supposed to do that? Does she want me to grow a pair of wings? Sorry, I left my Alicornification Fork at home today.
The wind rushing past us sings a song of imminent splatter. Just before it can reach the crescendo, our fall is stopped by a surprisingly soft yet soggy surface.
To think I’d ever be thankful for the mattress on my roof.
Derpy’s on her hooves in an instant, full on scowling now. “You won’t stop me. I need to do this. I have to. It’s the only way to keep her safe.”
After seeing her younger self, I just can’t quite bring myself to that same level of rage again. I have to try and talk her down. “I know you just want to protect her and somehow you think this is going to accomplish that, but there has to be a better way. Anything would be a better way than a pandemic.”
She shakes her head. “No. I’ve spent a lot of years thinking about it. It’s this or nothing. I’m going to make sure things happen as they should so you don’t get a chance to interfere.”
With that ominous declaration Derpy whips out her Spoon and, in a move I never thought of, spins her whole body on a hoof, before vanishing in a puff of red. Mine’s out with only a second’s delay.
“Follow that mare!”
The Time Spoon complies.
The scene before me is familiar. From atop the the museum I look down to see a younger version of myself and a younger Derpy talking outside the alley. Though I can’t see it, I know an even younger version of me is knocked out inside. The side of my head throbs in sympathy for her. I keep a steady eye on them as the other me hands off the bottle. If future Derpy is going to make her move, it’s going to be soon. Young Derpy waves and flies off. After a bit, younger me ducks back into the alley to deal with the consequences of her overeager fisticuffs.
I hop from one roof to the next, following Derpy the younger. Thankfully she flies close to the ground and the buildings are tightly spaced. She rounds a corner onto a side street and I’m forced to hop off and continue on ground level. Just as I round the corner past her I stop. Mostly because she’s stopped. Because now there are two of her.
“Stop!” I yell, “Whatever she says, don’t do it!” The older one’s a lost cause, but with the younger I may still have a chance. She hasn’t yet made the decision to release the sickness. If I can turn her, it might retroactively turn the other. Or at least make it two against one.
Younger Derpy turns to me, confusion coloring her features more than anything else. “Huh? Colgate? Why not?”
“Don’t listen to her!” Older Derpy snaps, reclaiming her younger self’s attention. “Listen to me. To yourself. I need you to open that jar and pour out what’s inside.”
“But the instructions in my message say I’m supposed to deliver it to-”
“Forget the message! I wrote the message! And I’m saying you need to release it here and now!”
“Don’t do it Derpy!” I trot closer, but Older Derpy cuts between us, keeping me from getting to close. “Do you even know what you’d be doing? Did she tell you what’s in there?
“...No,” Derpy admits, “But, she’s me. Why would I tell myself to do a bad thing?”
“It's a sickness!" I yell, "I’m from the future and I’m trying to stop it! If you open that jar, you’ll release a magical plague that’ll wipe all ponies off the face of the planet!”
She gasps and turns to her other self in shock. “Is- is that true?”
“Not all the ponies,” Older Derpy admits far too easily, “Just most of them.” Her eyes widen as she sees that she’s losing her younger self. “Wait! Listen! You have to! It’s the only way to keep Dinky safe!”
That pulls her up short. “Dinky? How is making ponies sick supposed to help her?”
“Because the future is a dangerous place.” Derpy the Elder sets down and tries to approach her self, but stops when the latter shies away. “Listen,” her tone turns soft, not unlike a mother soothing a child. “I’ve seen what’s coming. Monsters from the past. Gods of Chaos. A gluten-free health craze. It’s not pretty. It’s dangerous. Too dangerous. There’s things coming that we can’t protect her against. So the only solution is to get rid of everything that can hurt her before it does.”
“That’s your big plan?” I ask, stunned into disbelief by its sheer ridiculousness. “You released the worst terror to ever grace Equestrian soil just to take out a few threats?”
“The monsters,” she corrects me. “The villains. The beasts.”
“The Princesses.” I assume she got them, otherwise Twilight or one of the others would have already fixed things.
“More than one went evil at some point.”
“There’s more than one princess?” asks young Derpy, who’s, oddly enough, kind of fallen to the wayside in this argument.
“And what about everypony else?" I push, "Were they all also dangerous enough to get rid of?”
“They might have been.” Her stance remains firm and unwavering despite my cross-examination. “Lots of unicorns get tempted by evil artifacts, so they had to go. Then I realized I didn’t want to get accused of tribalism so the pegasi and the earth ponies had to go as well.”
She’s on a roll now. Just like I thought, even with a nontraditional villain who’s not trying to just take over something, she still can’t help but monologue. Must come with the package. And the younger Derpy is looking more and more horrified with each passing word. I just need to keep her going.
“So that’s it? That’s your real plan? Unleash a virus and get rid of absolutely every thinking creature outside of you and your daughter.”
“Not everypony,” she counters, “I narrowed it down to three groups to keep around. First, the bakers.”
“For muffins, I presume?”
“See, now you’re getting it!” She smiles and I shudder. “Next, the postal workers. Wouldn’t wanna accidentally hit myself.”
“Naturally.”
“And lastly the dentists.” Well that explains how I’m still alive and uninfected then. “So somepony’ll be able to remove Dinky’s braces when it's time.”
I start to nod along before her last comment properly registers. “Wait, what?”
“Can you imagine?” she asks, one again adopting that motherly tone that so contrasts with her actions. “Little Dinky living out her life in a perfectly safe world, but being forced to wear braces all her life cause there’s no pony around to remove them? It’d be an absolute nightmare! I wouldn’t wish that on anypony!”
So says the mare who felt justified in turning princesses, guards, and countless other ponies’ children into rabbits and birds and trees. Still, my sense of professionalism and my pride as a dentist compels me to correct her. “Derpy, that’s an orthodontist.”
“What? What do bird scientists have anything to do with it?”
I sigh as suddenly all the high fantasticism of saving the world fades into the mundanity of explaining differences of technical minutia to a fussy patient. “Not ornithologist, orthodontist. Those are the ponies who specialize in braces.”
She hesitates. For the first time since we started this mad argument she actually seems taken aback. “But… dentists do teeth. So they do braces too.”
“Wrong. Admittedly there’s some overlap, but largely it’s a very specialized field. Asking a random dentist to deal with braces is like asking a chemist to make you a fancy cake. They may understand some of the underlying principles, but there’s a lot of critical practical knowledge missing.
At last, it looks like something I’ve said is finally getting to her. She lowers to the ground, wings frozen mid-flap as she tries to fit this new knowledge into her rigid worldview. I can spot the exact moment she gives up as her brow furrows once more in anger and determination.
“No! No, it’ll work out! It has to! I’ve come too far and done too much to stop now.” She spins and grabs her younger self by her shoulders. “You have to do it now! Just open the jar and Dinky will be safe forever!”
She’s still scared, that much hasn’t changed, but there’s something else present in the younger pegasus’s expression. A firmness to her gaze that wasn’t there before. “Yeah… you see, I don’t think I’m going to do that.”
Her elder self reels back as though physically struck. “But- what? Why? Think about Dinky!”
Younger Derpy nods, the fear beginning to bleed away as her conviction solidifies. “I am. And I do want to try and protect her. But this plan… it’s too much. It’s a bad thing to do. You're not a good pony. If I heard that somepony went and did all the things you said you did, then I don’t think that’s the kind of pony I’d want Dinky to be around.
The older Derpy takes another step back, shock plastered over her face as she practically goes slack in disbelief. “But… you can’t. I can’t. I released it. I remember being here and doing it. Why doesn’t… why isn’t…”
I seize my opportunity and strike. She doesn’t have any pockets, so her Time Spoon is still clutched in her hoof. I touch it for a split-second to give it a loose destination, before I pull her own trick on her and spin her on one hoof like we’re dancing. As she starts to fall and the red mist begins to form, I lash out with my oldest and most reliable solution. My punch clips the edge of her Spoon, fracturing the ruby.
“Have fun in ancient Equestria!” I say as she disappears into nothingness.
Once a few seconds pass without her returning, I breathe a sigh of relief. It’s over. Finally, this time.
Derpy, the only one left, looks to me with worried and slightly frightened eyes. “What- what did you do?”
“Sent her back in time, far enough that she shouldn’t be able to bother you anymore." I note her concerned expression. "Don’t worry, she’ll probably cease to exist once I fix the timeline.” Probably. I’m still mostly winging this, but confidence is everything.
“Oh,” she says quietly. “I’m… sorry. About her. Me. Future me. I know she meant well but… sometimes, I can get lost in my own head. It’s not very nice and it gets really bad when I start to spiral, but usually there’s somepony around to pull me out. I guess, being all alone, there was nopony to help and she just got stuck in her own head until even the worst ideas seemed good.”
“Mhm,” I agree, though I’m really only half-listening. Her reasoning really doesn’t matter to me. She’s stopped, or maybe never started, and that’s what I set out to accomplish. Now all that’s left is to tie up a few loose ends. Without much pomp or circumstance, I take the bottle out of my pocket and smash it on a nearby wall. Red goo oozes out and immediately starts to dissipate into the air.
“What are you doing!?” Derpy cries, “I thought you were trying to stop this!”
“Calm down, I’m just maintaining causality. It’s not the same bottle you have. This one just causes a cold.” I gesture for her to hand me hers. After a moment’s hesitation, she complies. “You future self said dentists are immune to this, right?” Though I can’t imagine what kind of magical methods it uses to make that determination. At her nod, I pop the lid and swiftly pour it down my throat. It’s terrible, but also a good excuse to visit Berry Punch’s tonight. I’ve never known a virus that could survive long in an alcohol bath.
“So… what do I do now?” Derpy asks.
I shrug. “Go home? Pretend this never happened. Live your life, be good to your daughter, and make sure she brushes her teeth.”
She nods. “I’ll do that.”
I feel like I should probably deliver some kind of speech here, this being the end of my strange misadventure, but nothing really comes to mind. I’ve saved the day, saved a sweet mare from falling to her own dark impulses, and saved a filly from a life in braces. No one will ever know, but I guess that’s alright. At this point, I just want to go home before somepony else comes up behind me and knocks me out again.
With a short farewell to Derpy, I take out my Time Spoon and give it a spin. It feels so much more fluid now, almost like an extension of myself. A second passes before blue mist wipes away the world.