“Schaden, you’re going to have to move sometime,” Sunset groaned.
“Says you. I’m just gonna lie on this nice solid floor, not moving, barely breathing, until this thing is off my arm and the world doesn’t look like a coloring book just puked down my cerebral cortex,” I argued, vaguely muffled, as my face was flat on the castle floor. At least, I assumed it was a castle based on Sunset’s word and the fact that the rook we popped out of the portal into looked like an Iron Fortress got busy with a Saturday morning cartoon.
“No seriously, just get up. I promise you walking around is much easier on four legs-”
“WHICH I DO NOT HAVE.”
“And if you don’t get used to the hooves thing now-”
“DON’T HAVE THOSE EITHER.”
“-then this is going to be extremely difficult for both of us. And you might as well stop being stubborn now, you’re going to need that energy later, when-”
“Hi Sunset!” a familiar voice cheered, followed by the… weird clapping noise hooves make. I don’t know. I hate horses.
“She gets here. Hi Twilight!” I lifted my head just enough to see the two pastel quadrupedal night terrors exchange hugs.
“This is hell. I’m in a magical rainbow hell and I haven’t even finished sinning yet,” I groaned, complying against my better instincts and rising to my… hooves.
Twilight, the new… or old? Twilight raised an eyebrow at me, which is not something regular horses can do, and gave me an appraising look. “Hello Schaden. Other Schaden.” She shuddered. “God, I hate saying that. There’s two of them.”
Sunset nodded solemnly. “I know. Believe me, I get it. So the sooner we get this bracelet off of him, the better all our lives will be.”
“...why does it have wings? Horses don’t have wings. And I seriously doubt those flap-flaps are anywhere near the comfortable wing-to-body ratio for proper flight. AND DON’T SAY MAGIC.”
“...it’s magic. Also, we have skeletal systems closer to birds than horses when we grow wings. They’re called pegasi. But yeah, magic,” Sunset explained.
“...Dante is screaming right now.”
Twilight’s expression had achieved a wide array of emotions in the last few sentences, eventually settling on curiosity. “Dante?”
“Dante Alighieri, late 13th century Italian poet. And NO, SCHADEN, you don’t get to explain hell to the Princess of Friendship,” Sunset added, rather vehemently.
I lifted my… hoof, and nodded at the bracelet.
“...ok, fine. But not right now.”
Twilight looked between the two of us, aware of something obvious only to us. “Do I want to know, actually?”
Sunset sighed, and tapped her forehead with her hoof. What I assume to be the closest thing to pinching the bridge of your nose here. “From a theological, anthropological, and artistic standpoint? Absolutely. For the sake of your sanity? Absolutely bucking not.”
“I’m… sorry, did you just say bucking? Why not just say-”
“Don’t do it,” Sunset warned.
“No seriously, we’re all adults here. I mean, at least you two are, and I’m almost 18. You say it back home all the time. What’s wrong with saying-”
“No seriously, don’t.”
“Buck? ...buck? Buck. Buuuuuck. Ffffffffff-buck. Oh you have GOT TO BE KITTEN ME,” I bellowed.
Sunset groaned. “There’s a Decency Filter on the castle. For a wide variety of reasons, not the least of which is the regular presence of kids here. I know, I hate it too. Once you get like, a couple meters away from the castle-”
“-WHICH WILL NOT BE HAPPENING-” Twilight interjected.
“Have I mentioned I bloody hate magic?” I growled.
“Multiple times, and yet you never seem to run out of reasons to do so,” Sunset noted.
“WELL MAYBE IF IT WOUBLHGLRHGBRGLHGRBRGLHRGBRLGHRLGBLGRHG-” is all I get out before the bracelet electrocutes me again and I fall to the floor, having lost the feeling in my forelegs.
“Twilight!” Sunset barked.
“What?! I just wanted to see if it worked! I didn’t know it would be that bad!”
“What part of electrocution sounds not bad?!”
The Princess huffed. “Well, I thought it would be like, I dunno, a static shock or something! Not a shock collar! And you said it was mild!”
Sunset glanced from Twilight, to my twitching body, to Twilight. “You’re right, that is a lot stronger than when other Twilight tried it. Maybe it’s because of how much more powerful you are?”
“Skrrzit margle flargle marm,” I grumble, shaking my leg to get the feeling back. It maybe twitched a little.
“It could be due to the greater ambient energy in Equestria as opposed to your world,” the Princess suggested.
“Murgle barg burgle blimp.” Oh hey, there you are legs, good to see you.
“Maybe it’s drawing on an external power source, stemming from this dimension? It could grow in strength due to proximity-”
“CUMP,” I exclaimed, very shakily standing up, and swaying back and forth.
Sunset seemed to remember the recently tazed horse in the room first. “Oh, sorry, Schaden! Are you ok?”
“Ig gonfa fome upspoon,” I managed to get out.
“He seems a little shake-Sunset, what’s with the bucket?” Twilight asked, as Sunny shoved a big metal pail- from where I have no idea- directly under my face.
Into which I promptly emptied my stomach.
“Let’s just say being a teenage girl with a bunch of other teenage girls as friends means I can understand the phrase ‘I’m going to throw up soon’ in pretty much any format.”
------------------------
Once my stomach had settled, and the girls had agreed that electrocuting the person who came to them for help was in poor taste, I had been escorted to The Science Room™. Princess Twilight had called it something else more… professional, but the instant I saw it, that was what I called it. The Science Room™ looked like Frankenstein had taken up watercolors instead of reanimation, but with very similar methods. Seriously, why was everything in this awful place bright pastel?
Including the lights blinking to and from the giant pasta strainer on my head, the metal bands on all my legs, and the wide variety of EKG stickies all over my body.
“What’s an EKG?” Twilight asked, placing the last one on my temple.
“Electrocardiogram,” Sunset and I said simultaneously.
The former elaborated: “It’s a device humans use to measure electrical activity in the body, focused on the electrical signals leading to and from the heart.”
“Fascinating!” Twilight mused. “I wonder if I could retool the MIS to do that?”
“MIS?” I asked, barely squeezing the question out of a wooden plate Twilight was shoving in my mouth.
“Magical Impulse Spectrometer,” Twilight and Sunset echoed. Again, Sunset continued: “It measures the body’s reaction to magical impulses to chart the flow of magic throughout your system.”
“An da ooden ton tin?”
Twilight didn’t look up from whatever machine she was fiddling with. “Oh, that’s in case the MIS triggers the defensive response of your bracelet. Don’t want you biting through your tongue.”
Sunset gave me a deadpan stare, which I returned in kind. “Yes, yes, I know, ‘You hate magic’.”
I nodded, glad she got the message. The system beeped a few times, then a few more, as Twilight moved from device to device, reading output graph after graph. Within moments Sunset, too, was swept up in The Science™, and I was almost all but forgotten.
You know, until FLASH. BANG.
Which, for some reason, none of Twilight’s machines particularly enjoyed. They ‘voiced’ their displeasure through a series of explosions, sparks, and rather vehement alarms as The Science Room™ went tits-up.
About five seconds into everything going to hell (with a distinct and disturbing lack of glitter, mind you), we were all swept away in a flash of light, and reappeared in a much brighter, more open room.
“FLARGBHRBLBRHGLBRLHGBRLH.”
“Oh, right, triggered by magic,” Twilight groaned, with a respectable amount of remorse.
------------------------------
After another bucket and a round of apologies, the next place I found myself, and this should come as a surprise to absolutely no one, was a library.
I glanced around the room, at a wide series of books in languages I didn’t speak, I mused allowed- “And we didn’t start here why?”
“Because I wanted more information to narrow down my research,” Twilight explained, somewhat exasperated, turning a page. She had settled into a large armchair with an almost comical stack of books. “The more data I have, the faster I can narrow down whatever I’m looking for.”
“So why aren’t we outside, running more tests? I can’t imagine you got everything you needed from like, five minutes with the Magic-O-Tron 5000 down there,” I guessed, giving up trying to read anything in this room and settling widely into a rather comfortable couch.
“Ok, first off, Magic-O-Tron?” Sunset chided. “Second, letting you outside is a distinctly bad idea, mainly because, even taking into consideration present circumstances, we don’t entirely trust you not to do something fishy.”
“Ok, come on, even I’m not that bad,” I argued. I shifted a bit to get more comfortable. Not counting the BEING A HORSE thing, which was a point I was ready to hammer home until the nail popped out of the ground in Australia.
Sunset glanced at me, put her book down, and sighed, closing her eyes. “Schadenfreude, I don’t think you understand the position you’re in. Number one, there are still plenty of ponies- yes, ponies- who don’t know about the parallel world, so explaining how you got to Ponyville- don’t even start- without anypony- no seriously just roll with it- having seen you come and go would be hard enough, especially considering how small this town is. Yes, even with the castle here. Two, people in this town know you. You’d have to be ready to explain your presence, and absence from your royal duties, to anypony- seriously can you put the face away?- you come across. You’ve got friends here, and any story you could make up about you being here from Canterlot would fall apart the instant they asked for anything even resembling details. Three, your Equestrian counterpart is so notoriously dickish as to have legal documents drawn up about him, and regularly edited.”
“I was meaning to ask about that, anyway,” I interjected. “Wouldn’t a document like that be extremely difficult to enforce, legally? I mean, even in a… monarchy?”
“Diarchy,” Twilight corrected.
“Right, even in a royally governed country like this one, I can’t imagine having a legally ratified charter saying I can’t like, tie knots on Wednesdays would actually hold up in any kind of court.”
Twilight laughed humorlessly. “It wouldn’t. The only reason our Schadenfreude hasn’t challenged it under, really, and number of civil rights laws is because he sees it as a sort of game between him and the Princesses. Training the guards about the list is more just to make sure he isn’t twisting the rules into an unrecognizable, crying knot every other week.”
“...that all does sound like something I would do.”
“Right,” Sunset jumped in, eager to make her point. “Now imagine that-” she emphasized, pointing a hoof at me, “-that mentality right there, in the hands of somepony- will you stop with the face- that has both political influence and direct contact with any number of royal figureheads on a day to day basis! Between your counterpart’s rampant reputation in the national capital, the rate of gossip between magazines, traders, and, you know, our own presiding royalty,” she gestured to Twilight, who barely acknowledged the gesture, having rapidly sunk back into her book, “There’s not a lot of ponies who don’t know who you are. Now, I know none of this is your fault, and while your other you isn’t exactly seen as any kind of villain, famous is still famous, especially in a small town full of gossip. It would only be a matter of time before it got back to Canterlot that there was another one of you running around, and then who knows what would happen?”
“Ok, even giving that I bought all of that, that’s still all based on the underlying, and rather dubious, premise that the other me is horse-famous. You said he’s basically just a more privileged version of me, how can he be famous?” I argued.
“Twilight?” Sunset asked.
The Princess didn’t even look up from her book. “Best friends with the God of Chaos. Made several guard captains cry, including my brother, the head of the royal guard. Sparked at least three international incidents, one of which still hasn’t completely resolved. Has actually, and very annoyingly, saved the world on more than one occasion, including breaking my personal record by doing it three times in one day. Which, as a result, means he’s now recognized as an honorary Class 2 Archeomancer, despite not being able to use magic!”
Sunset’s eyebrows shot up. “Class 2? I thought you were a Class 2? Aren’t there only like, 4 of them?”
“Like I said, honorary. Also, I got demoted after that… incident. Something something leave the puzzle boxes alone wee wah wee wah.”
“...the buck’s an archeomaBBLRHGBRLHGBGBGLHRBRLBRLHGBR.”
“TWILIGHT."