"Where is it?" Twilight Sparkle rummaged through her saddlebag for the third time. Books, quill, spare quill, ink, spare ink, juice box, miniature abacus, but no checklist. "Where is it?" she repeated, exasperated. She shook the bag out, but no absurdly extensive scroll fell out with the rest of its contents. Her other saddlebag was empty, reminding her that there was a reason she'd needed such a large list today: grocery day. "Maybe if I just run back to the library…" Her gaze fell on the clock tower. No, that wouldn't do. Even if she blinked back to retrieve her list, it would throw off her whole schedule. The delay to check her bag had already set her back.
She increased her pace, approaching the market as she frantically thought about how to solve this. Maybe a scrying spell to see the list? Only, she didn't remember where she'd left it. A calligraphy recall spell on her quill? But she didn't know which one had been used to write the list. Wait…recall. “A self-applied memory spell should work!” She kept walking and concentrated. Magic swirled around her horn, and she closed her eyes for the brief moment she'd need to complete the spell. She could almost see the list. The first item was-
"Alright, Derpy, we've got to-oof!" A brown earth pony wearing a tie careened around a corner and knocked heads with the unicorn just as the spell completed. The grey pegasus who rounded the corner next found the two sprawled on the ground.
"Doctor!" Derpy helped the earth pony back to his feet, then gasped as she noticed who the stallion had collided with. "Twilight! You okay?"
"Wha…" Twilight forced her eyes to stop spinning in their orbits. "Oh, I'm fine, Derpy. I should have been paying attention."
"Completely my fault, I'm afraid," the brown stallion apologized. Twilight noted his accent. Trottingham? "I'm always running around like that. Never know who or what you'll bump into."
"Oh, no harm done, Doctor…" The unicorn frowned. "You know, I've seen you around before, but I don't know your name."
"John Sm-er, Time Turner," the stallion answered. "Sorry, we've really got to be going. Come on Derpy!" He galloped off, the grey pegasus at his heels.
"It was nice meeting you!" Twilight called after them as they rounded the next corner. She frowned. That Doctor's cutie mark seemed strangely familiar…
The chime of the clock tower brought her back to the matters at hoof. "Focus, Twilight. You can work on remembering that after you've used what you've just remembered.” She consulted her refreshed memory as she trotted towards a market stall. Now, the first thing on the list was…
***
"Bananas?" Spike asked, surprised.
"Well, yeah," Twilight said, telekinetically supporting a bunch of bananas and several grocery bags. "It was first on the list."
"Oh, right. The list," Spike said sheepishly. "I just found it in the fridge. Otherwise, I would've run it out to you."
"The fridge? Why was it there?"
"I dunno. But here it is if you want to check everything." The dragon unrolled the scroll. He blinked, confused. "Weird. The first thing on the list is pears, not bananas."
"What? I hate pears!" Twilight suppressed a shudder at the mention of the hated fruit. "Spike, why'd you put them on the list?"
"Uh, Twilight, you made the shopping list, remember?"
"Oh." Twilight was puzzled. "Why'd I…never mind, I must have meant a pair of bananas."
"Then why'd you buy a bunch?"
"Bananas are good." The unicorn plucked one from the bunch and peeled it for a quick snack as she trotted over to her desk. "Can you put the groceries away, please, Spike?"
"Sure thing." The dragon carried the bags and the bunch of bananas into the kitchen. He opened the fridge to put away the perishables and blinked at one food item on the middle shelf. "Huh." He pulled the half-eaten pear pie out and looked at it closely. "She really liked it yesterday. Maybe she ate a bad slice?"
***
Twilight meanwhile was still trying to remember why that mark looked familiar. It wasn't that an hourglass was too uncommon, it was just she was sure she'd seen the same stallion with the same mark, only different somehow…but where? No, not where, when. Or maybe both?
The time and place rushed back to her: Cloudsdale! She could have sworn one of the junior fliers had been that same stallion. But that was impossible; he was an earth pony, and the competitor, obviously, had been a pegasus. There was no way they could be the same pony. She sighed in frustration. If she hadn't used that time travel spell to warn herself for nothing, she could have used it to verify if her memory was accurate. Wait, why had she thought about the time spell? She could just use the memory spell...except memory could be inaccurate, obviously. Take that shopping list: She was sure she'd written bananas, but instead she'd written pears! Blech!
A small sand timer on her desk caught her eye. On a whim, she flipped it over. The grains began to run out. She flipped it back. The few that had fallen returned. "It's almost like you're suspended in time, able to go forwards or backwards at will…"
An idea sprang into her mind. She concentrated, recalling the spell she'd used all those Tuesdays ago. Then, as the magic grew, instead of trying (and doubtless failing) to use it on herself, she redirected the spell onto the timer, flipping it as she did so. The arcane whirling surrounded the tiny item, and it vanished in a bright flash, only to reappear less than a second later with a similar flash. It seemed as if the miniature hourglass had gone nowhere, except the sands inside showed that slightly more than a full minute had passed for it, a minute that had not passed for her. She tried to repeat the spell, but this time the hourglass just sat there, unmoving save for the last few grains of sand. "Okay, so definitely not repeatable…unless…" She thought over it. "If whatever I send back has a minute in the past, and 1 second to dematerialize and rematerialize now…"
A sudden wind whipped through the room, and magical energy began spouting from a spot on her desk. Twilight's eyes widened, and she flipped the spent timer back over as a bubble of magic materialized. The magic grew and finally burst, and a quill appeared on her desk, slightly smoking but undamaged. "Okay…so there's also time to materialize on the receiving end."
Twilight watched for about a minute, until magical sparks began to run along the length of the quill, and it vanished. Twilight quickly picked up a quill from her desk and cast the time spell on it, retrieving the (original?) quill for examination a second later. "That was close. Could've caused a paradox." Still… if she sent an object back in time the amount of time from the timer, plus the time needed to materialize, plus the second for the object to return to the caster…
A fresh arcane wind began, and she waited until the bubble appeared and started to collapse before casting the spell on what she'd intended to the whole time; a pencil. A second later, the pencil was gone and back…or had it ever left? She cast the spell on it again, this time redirecting it to a different location. The pencil blinked in and out, just as Spike burst out of the kitchen.
"Twilight! I found a pencil in the freezer, and I was using it to write a new shopping list when it just exploded only it didn't wreck anything, but there was smoke and then…" He trailed off as he saw the pencil on the desk. "Um…is this that time spell again?"
"Yes, Spike, sorry about that." Twilight tried casting the spell on the pencil again, only for it to fail, as she expected. But why did it work twice before? Unless… "Spike, do we have any other hourglasses?"
"Well, we've got that big one the Mayor uses to time public events."
"Perfect! Now help me move this table, we've got work to do!"
***