The inhabitants of the unfamiliar dimension continued to open their mail.
The visiting Twilight looked around.
“Wait a second,” she said to anyone who would listen. “Why did you all momentarily stop in the middle of that?”
Applejack stepped over. “It’d been five minutes,” she said. “You can’t get a lot done in five minutes, so sometimes we have to take a break even if things haven’t reached a satisfying conclusion or dramatic moment.”
As the visiting Twilight tried to make sense of that, the native Twilight, who was sitting nearby, let out a groan of annoyance.
“I got another chain letter!” she complained. From the small envelope, she began to remove a chain made of thick metal links. And kept removing it until about seven body lengths of chain were in a coiled pile on the ground. “If I don’t send this on to some other pony, I’ll be cursed with a lifetime of bad luck!”
“Ooh, my cousin-in-law out west has been looking for a chain like that,” Applejack said, walking from one Twilight to the other. “I’ll take care of that for you.”
It was at that point that the visiting Twilight reached her conclusion regarding the overall intelligence of the inhabitants of the dimension she was in.
“Bills,” Rarity said, shuffling through her collection of envelopes. “Insurance advertisements. Unsolicited love letters.” She moved a thick cluster of heart-covered envelopes to the back, then scrutinized the next one, which was festooned with dollar signs. “‘You may already be a winner.’ Darling, I already am a winner. At life.”
Suddenly, a sharp gasp that captured the attention of everyone in the room.
“It’s finally here!” Rarity declared while flaring her wings. She stood on her hind legs and held up an envelope, letting her other mail fall to the floor. “The letter I’ve been waiting for from the Equestrian Academy of Television Crafts and Disciplines!”
Pinkie appeared, looking over Rarity’s right shoulder. “What’s it say?” She then appeared over Rarity’s left shoulder. “What’s it say?” She then appeared directly over Rarity’s head. “What’s it say?”
Rarity opened the envelope and took a moment to read the letter.
“Ladies,” she announced to the room. “I have been selected…”
A small alligator walked in on his two hind legs with a snare drum hanging from his neck. He performed a drumroll.
“…to host this year’s Judys!”
Her five friends cheered and rushed over to surround her in a group hug.
The visiting Twilight knew well enough to wait for the hug to end before asking her question.
“What are the Judys?”
“Darling, you’ve never heard of the Judys? Why, they’re only the premier awards for the field of television!”
Across the room, the lights went dark. A single spotlight shone on a pedestal displaying a golden statuette depicting a pegasus on its hind legs, using its forelegs to hold aloft a wire-frame cube. Fluttershy appeared behind the statuette to model it as it slowly rotated.
“Each year,” Rarity narrated, “performers, producers, and directors from across Equestria gather to celebrate their work on the small screen. But only the best of the best get to take home the coveted Judy trophy.”
The spotlight went out and the focus shifted back to Rarity.
“To create the proper atmosphere of glamour and sophistication, the annual presentation is presided over by a master of ceremonies who exhibits elegance, style, grace, and wit. This year, that host shall be none other than yours truly!”
The sparkles surrounding her dissipated to reveal Rainbow Dash reading the letter. “Wow, Rarity,” she said, “I didn’t know you could tap dance.”
“I dabbled a bit during my vaudeville days,” Rarity said, absentmindedly twirling a hoof in the air, “but I wouldn’t say it’s part of my repertoire…”
Her foreleg slowly froze in place.
“Why would you mention that?”
“It says here you need to perform a big opening number with singing and tap dancing.”
Rarity snatched the letter from Rainbow’s hooves. “They expect me to tap dance?!?”
A fainting couch materialized out of thin air behind Rarity. She lay down on it.
“How will I learn a Judy-worthy tap routine in such a short amount of time?”
The visiting Twilight looked over to see whether the previous fainting couch was still present in the room. It wasn’t. Still, she couldn’t be certain whether the current couch was a new one – after all, the baseball bat, empty potion bottles, and rotating Judy statuette had also mysteriously disappeared from the room as soon as no one was thinking about them anymore.
Rainbow Dash hopped onto the couch. “Don’t worry,” she said. “When it comes to precision movement at a high rate of speed, nopony’s better than me. I’ll teach you that dance in no time!”
Music began to play as Rainbow and Rarity took part in a series of exercises and attempts to master the dance. While that was going on, the visiting Twilight walked over to the native Twilight, who was sitting on the floor off to the side.
“So this dimension has television,” she said. “Along with motorcycles and airplanes.”
“Yours doesn’t?” the native Twilight said. It was as though she couldn’t believe such a thing was possible.
“Nothing quite that technologically advanced,” she said. “Although I’ve been to a world that did have all of those things. You don’t happen to have a portal to a dimension where the dominant species is a form of primate, do you?”
She shook her head. “No. And if we’re so technologically advanced, then why are you the one who’s been to multiple dimensions?”
“That’s just advanced magic. You have magic too, right?”
With a glow of her horn and a poof of magenta smoke, the native Twilight materialized an upside-down top hat on the floor. She reached a hoof in and pulled out Angel.
“Ta-da!”
“I see.”
On the other side of the bakery, a narrow plank was set up across a vat of water. As Rainbow Dash flew overhead with a baseball cap on her head and whistle around her neck, Rarity attempted to tap-dance across the plank. Before she reached the halfway point, her legs got tangled up and she fell in.
The visiting Twilight turned back to the other. “Not that I’m complaining,” she said, “but wasn’t Rainbow Dash accusing one of us of being evil just a few minutes ago? It felt like that never got resolved.”
Applejack walked over and sat down. “That moment’s in the past,” she said. “You shouldn’t go trying to remember every little thing that’s happened in the past. Rainbow Dash is trying to teach Rarity how to dance, and that’s all that’s important right now.”
Twilight suppressed a frustrated groan. She decided that it would be wiser to change the subject. “I suspect that I know what the answer to this will be,” she said, “but in my dimension, Rainbow Dash hasn’t really shown any proclivity for disciplined dancing. I don’t suppose she has a history of doing that here?”
“Not that I’ve seen,” the native Twilight said.
“Nope,” Applejack confirmed. “But if Rarity needs to learn how to dance, then I figure one of us needs to teach her how to dance.”
Fluttershy flew over and sat down on the floor next to Applejack. She said, “It’s what needs to happen, so we’ll make it happen. Even if you wouldn’t normally expect the pony doing it to do it.”
“That’s right!” Pinkie said as she corralled five crabs toward a miniature stage so they could snap their claws in proper time to the music.
The visiting Twilight looked over at Rainbow Dash, who was inexplicably wearing pony-sized crab claws over her front hooves.
“Maybe I need some fresh air,” she said.
“Why?! Why did I go outside? Why did I not realize that if the inside didn’t make any sense…”
Twilight gestured toward the landscape in front of her. When neither Applejack nor the native Twilight responded, she gestured more broadly and forcefully in the futile hope that her point was evident.
“It looks like an ordinary day in Ponyville to me,” the native Twilight said.
The part of Twilight’s brain devoted to sorting and prioritizing, having operated at full throttle ever since she stepped through the mirror, briefly shut down. As a result, she began to spew a rapid series of words that was as close to a run-on sentence as she had ever vocalized.
“Were there sudden, violent tectonic shifts shortly before this town was built? Isn’t an island far from the densely packed center of town a very bad location for a bakery? Why is the water pink? How are there masses of land just floating in midair? Are we on a landmass floating in midair? How does anypony survive when these steep, cliff-adjacent surfaces get slick during the winter? If you have television, then why are there no electrical lines? Why don’t I see a single other pony outside anywhere? What is the function of the patio umbrella sticking out sideways from the cliff edge? Does your language even have the words ‘perpendicular’ or ‘parallel’?”
Twilight’s legs gave out and she collapsed on the ground, nearly hyperventilating. Applejack stepped over, sat down, and placed a gentle hoof on her shoulder.
“Feel better?”
With her face in the grass, Twilight wearily said, “Yes.” She lifted her head and got another glimpse of the scenery. “No.”
“And it’s not true there aren’t any other ponies anywhere. Why, here come Apple Bloom and her friends right now!”
Over the bridge trotted three slightly shorter ponies that Twilight recognized as the Cutie Mark Crusaders. They weren’t all that much smaller than the stubby, big-headed native versions of her friends, but she couldn’t use that information to determine their relative ages. After all, the CMCs in her dimension were way overdue for a growth spurt.
“Hi, Applejack!” said Scootaloo.
“Hi, Applejack!” said Sweetie Belle.
“Hi, Applejack!” said Sweetie Belle’s voice coming from Apple Bloom’s mouth.
Twilight dropped her face into the grass again. A blast of magic left a divot in the place where her horn had been pointed.
“It’s the inconsistency that’s killing me,” she said to herself. “If I knew it was coming, it would make things easier somehow.”
“Why are there two Twilight Sparkles?” asked Sweetie Belle. Or maybe Apple Bloom. Twilight wasn’t looking.
“That one over there is visiting us from another dimension,” Applejack said. “She’s having a rough time adjusting.”
“I’m the normal one!” the native Twilight said.
“That’s what worries me…” the other Twilight moaned to herself.
Applejack lifted her hat, pulled out a pocket watch, and checked it. “Looks like it’s about time for the girls to finish helping.” She turned to the CMCs. “You three wanna see Rarity perform an amazing tap dance number?”
“Yeah!” the three fillies said in unison. With a blur of motion, they raced toward the door before Applejack could even turn around. They zipped past the native Twilight so quickly, it sent her spinning rapidly in place.
A dizzy Twilight Sparkle stumbled over to the one who was still lying face-first in the grass. She collapsed next to her.
“Maybe things here do get a little disorienting from time to time,” she said.
The native Twilight duplicated the visiting Twilight’s position by dropping her face to the ground. The only difference was that in her case, the image of three skittering crabs started floating in a horizontal circle around her head.
The visiting Twilight looked up, saw the imaginary crustaceans, and decided it was better for her brain if she kept staring into the dirt.