//------------------------------//
// Darkest Before the Dawn 
// Story: Twilight Loses Her Innocence (Anything to Save the World) 
// by Mockingbirb 
//------------------------------//

In the darkness before the dawn, two sisters shared a single hotel room bed, to make a high school's field trip that much more affordable. The school principal slept with her limbs sprawled across the bed. Drool slowly escaped from one corner of her open mouth. 

Her younger sister snored beside her, embracing the other with one arm. In her sleep, Vice Principal Luna used her sister's upper arm and shoulder as a pillow. Such an adorable sight!

But if an adorable sight happens in a hotel room without any witnesses, was the adorableness definitely and completely real, or merely hypothetical?

The unwitnessed cuteness was disturbed, however, by someone pounding on the hotel room's door. "Principal Celestia! Are you in there? I have a very important question about science!"

"Waah?" Principal Celestia said. She rolled over, letting her sister's head drop onto the bedsheets.

Luna's eyes opened. She tried to roll out of the bed, but her movement became more of a sliding fall off the side of the bed opposite her sister. 

"Oof!" Luna said. The darker of the two sisters slowly stood, and shuffled to the door. "Is that you, Twilight?"

"You two should get up. It's important!"

Luna snorted. She opened the hotel room door just a tiny bit. Through the inch-wide gap she asked, "Why can't it wait until morning? What is it, the end of the world?"

The nerdy high school student said, "Well..."

"Well WHAT?"

"Maybe kind of?"

"Be more specific, Twilight. Or go back to bed."

Twilight bit her lower lip. "I think the most important part of the scientific method is not assuming that we DO know things that we don't really know for sure. Keeping an eye open for the possibility that we might be wrong about something."

"You woke me up to talk about philosophy?"

"I just thought, since your counterparts in the mirror world of Equestria have...certain jobs...and everyone in OUR world seems to be panicking...I mean, maybe it's just a coincidence, and you DON'T have anything to do with it--"

"Anything to do with what?"

Twilight glanced out the window at the softly glowing moon. "The sun was supposed to come up three hours ago."

Luna sighed. "I should have known this day would come." She walked over to the bed. "Celestia? It's time to get up."

Still mostly asleep, Celestia said, "You do it, Luna. Whatever it is."

Luna sighed again. She went to the room's sliding glass door, and opened it. "Twilight...don't tell anyone I did this. Or at least be very careful who you tell." 

Twilight followed Luna out onto the balcony. Luna stared intently at the moon. The night sky moved slowly but perceptibly, carrying the moon and all the stars along with it.

The moon sank low in the west (the same side of the sky where the moon always rose and set.) The eastern sky lightened. The sun's rays shone through gaps between buildings. As the sky continued to rotate around the earth, or seem to, the sun rose into the sky.

Luna sighed. "I suppose that's good enough, for now."

Twilight stared at Luna, and out at the now blue sky, and back at her Vice Princpal again. "That was AMAZING! Everything we think we know about astronomy and geodynamics is wrong!"

Luna shook her head. "You're exaggerating, Twilight."

"I know what I saw! All the scientists think sunrise and sunset happen the way they do in our world because the Earth is tidally locked by the Sun's gravity, but with a HUGE wobble that makes our planet shake its face back and forth between the sun and moon in a twenty-four hour cycle. Geodynamicists have spent LIFETIMES trying to understand how hysteresis in the motion of the Earth's core, and quirks of the Earth's magnetic field, cause the sun to rise and set as rapidly as it does, and then just stay in the same place for hours. But we've all been wrong! Sunrise and sunset are caused by our own world's version of magical pony powers!"

Celestia raised her head slightly. She looked at her enthusiastic student, and at the beautiful morning outside. She opened her mouth to say, "Oh, shit."

Luna turned towards her sister. "Oh shit is right! Didn't you even check your alarm clock before you went to bed? What were you thinking?"

Celestia said blearily, "I set ALL my alarm clocks yesterday. I remember it...like it was yesterday."

"Then what went wrong?"

"I'm sure they're all ringing and chiming and buzzing, back at home."

Luna looked at the street below the balcony. "The good news is, no one seems to have set the city on fire. So I guess it's not all THAT bad."

Celestia sighed. "So we messed up ONCE. What's the worst thing that could happen?"

Twilight opened the hotel room's door all the way.

In the hallway, Fluttershy sat upon a hotel mattress. She was ripping off all the tags, even the ones that said "Do not remove under penalty of law."

Silver Spoon and Diamond Tiara wore matching horse costumes. They'd cornered Flash Sentry against the wall. "Come on, Flash, everyone knows you REALLY LIKE horses. Don't you want to ENJOY what might be our last day ever, before the world ends?"

Diamond said, "We deserve to NOT have to die without any experience at all!"

He shook his head. "Um...uh...TWILIGHT!" He pushed past the girls to run into Celestia's and Luna's room, hiding behind Twilight. "Thank Harmony you're here to save me!"

Farther along the hallway, Square Root and Micro Chips both had their pants off. Square was carefully working a giant marijuana cigarette up Micro's rear end, and trying to light it. Square already had a foot-long doobie of his own protruding from between his buttocks.

"Putting it up there is supposed to work really well for alcohol," Square said. "So why NOT try it with other drugs too?"

Twilight, Luna, and Celestia marveled at the spectacle. Luna put a hand on Flash's shoulder. "Is everyone acting this crazy?" she asked.

Flash said, "Well...Sunset said since the world might end any minute anyway, maybe she'll try to quit smoking."

Twilight clenched her fists. "But it's NOT ending! It was just a little...I mean, I'm sure there's a perfectly rational scientific explanation for all this."

From the hallway, Micro's youthful voice said, "Wow! It IS just like pooping!" His rear end blew a smoke ring.

Luna closed the room's door. "Flash," she said, "can you keep a secret?"

Flash's eyes flicked past her, towards the door that hid the hallway scene of anarchic debauchery. "Apparently not. Going by what Silver and Diamond were just saying." He looked into Twilight's eyes, his voice cracking a little from his anguish. "Is it true? Does everyone really know?"

Twilight said, "Yeah, pretty much." She pulled her phone out of her pocket, and displayed a photo. Someone had taken a revealing shot of Flash Sentry trying to hump the Wondercolts statue that stood on a pedestal outside of Canterlot High School. "But on the bright side, everyone who's seen the pictures ALSO knows you're hung like a horse."

Flash cried out, "I don't want to be objectified!"

"Like you did to that statue?" Luna asked.

"That's different. The statue IS an object! But I'm a real boy."

Twilight snorted. "Photo says you're a real MAN. Or maybe part man, part horse. But anyway...when I asked if you can keep a secret--"

Flash shook his head. "I can't handle even one more secret. Not with all this other craziness." He pulled open the door and strode out of the room.

Twilight shouted at his back, "Just keep it in your pants for right now! I promise the skies will be back to normal soon! The sun and the moon and everything!"

Luna shut the room's door. "Twilight? Do you have a plan?"

"I just thought...all we have to do is make sure you two raise the sun and moon on schedule from now on, and everything will be fine, right? I mean, people should forgive a one-time mistake. Forgive and forget."

Celestia pulled her toothbrush out of her mouth. "You'd like to think that. Raise the sun on schedule every morning for centuries, and people just take it for granted. But get it wrong JUST ONCE..." She shook her head. "I still remember what happened last time, a few thousand years ago."

Luna explained, "In every city and every village, there are idiots who think they're prophets with messages from Harmony or the Heavenly Alien Brothers or the Ancient Murder Gods. Sometimes they even go on record with stupid predictions. When something happens that takes away people's faith that the universe makes sense...people become desperate. People look for an explanation, even if it's a stupid explanation. The idiots get followers."

Twilight's phone chimed. With a finger stroke, she pulled up an app. "Wow! My 'Astronomy Is Amazing' fluttr channel has thousands of new subscribers, just in the last few hours."

"That's wonderful," Celestia said. "So not EVERYONE desperate for an explanation decides to follow some idiot."

Luna nodded. "It's a very good sign."

Twilight said hopefully, "So maybe everyone will just go back to normal?"

Luna pursed her lips. "You might hope so. But I don't think it's that easy."

Celestia frowned. "Even if the sun and moon go back to their normal schedule, people will still remember that this morning happened."

"Or didn't happen," Luna remarked. "Since the sun DIDN'T--"

"In any case," Celestia interrupted, "the world's confidence in the future has been shaken. A confidence not so easy to fully regain. They might never feel the same way about the future, not ever again."

Twilight wailed, "Are you saying that people might keep acting crazy? Flash deserves to only be sexually harassed by girls who are eighteen and over. And I don't want Chips and Square to set themselves on fire just because they think the world might end anytime."

Out in the hallway, a youthful voice screamed. Twilight opened the door to see Flash using a fire extinguisher on Chips' still pantsless rear end. "Thank you!" Chips said. "Thank you so much!"

Flash said with a charming smile, "Anytime!" He went behind Square and turned the spray on Square's giant doobie for a moment.

"Aw man!" Square said. "It was just staring to get good."

Flash said in a serious tone, "Listen to Smoky Bear. Just say no to forest fires, and to burning drugs in your rear end."

Twilight closed the door again. "You see?" she said. "Things are KIND OF under control."

Luna sighed. "We can TRY to keep a perfectly regular schedule. Maybe that will help." She didn't sound like she believed it.

Celestia insisted, "But that still won't be enough! Their confidence in the future is broken!"

Twilight said, "I have an idea." She didn't look or sound happy.

Luna asked, "What kind of idea? Are you going to build a time machine, and make this morning never have happened this way?"

Out in the hallway, girlish voices screamed. Twilight peered through the door's peephole. Flash was spraying the fire extinguisher again, to defend himself from three teenage girls dressed in pony costumes.

"No," Twilight said. "I've tried to build a time machine and change the past before, but it never works out. It always goes wrong and causes ANOTHER disaster in addition to the problem I was trying to fix, and I get all freaked out partway through. Also, I get SO SICK of having to wear an eyepatch, because partway through any time traveling adventure I usually hurt my eye."

Luna blinked. "I've never seen you wearing an eyepatch."

Twilight explained, "I usually go back in time a SECOND time, and UNDO my fix for the FIRST problem. It's better to go back to just having the original problem. When that works, I usually lose the eyepatch somewhere along the way."

Luna nodded. "I understand."

"DO you? Do you REALLY?"

"Let's just say, I have some faith in you, and in your practical experience exploring things man was not meant to know."

Twilight sighed. "Good enough."

Celestia chimed in, "Twilight? You said you had an idea."

The teenage genius nodded. "I do. But just thinking about it...it makes me feel dirty. It's an idea...but it's dirty and dishonest and wrong."

Celestia asked, "Is it any more dirty and wrong than the things that we've seen happening in that hallway this morning?"

Twilight sighed. "I don't know. It's like this...I've been studying the scientific method. One big problem in science is called 'overfitting.'"

Celestia asked, "What's that? Is that like when Square tried to fit an enormous marijuana cigarette into--"

"No! It's not like that at all. It's when people have some data about the past, and they work so hard to build a theory that fits whatever happened in the past, they become unrealistic about whether their theory is really likely to describe the future at all."

Luna blinked. "I think I see. To restore humanity's faith that the cycle of sunrise and sunset really does make some kind of sense, you want to construct some kind of contrived theory that explains what happened this morning, and publicize the theory. A theory to reassure people, the world isn't really about to end."

Celestia asked, "But will people really have confidence in your theory? Or will they just think you're making up excuses for a delayed sunrise after it's already happened?"

Twilight miserably bit her lower lip. "That's the really dirty part. All I have to do is build a reassuring but FAKE scientific theory that describes the past, AND predicts some minor schedule discrepancies in the future. But also promises they'll never get too bad. That even if the sun goes a little off schedule, the world won't really end."

Celestia said. "A promise that things won't ever get TOO bad? I suppose that could help."

Luna frowned. "But will anyone believe you?"

"That's where it gets EVEN MORE immoral. Once my theory is out there, and its reputation is on the line...MY reputation...we just make sure that YOU two produce the exact same minor schedule discrepancies that my theory predicts. So people will feel confident in my theory, and safe again."

Celestia said, "It could work. What a wonderfully clever plan."

Luna scowled. "What a horribly dishonest plan: you'll just fill your science with fraud and lies. No wonder you hate it."

Twilight nodded, as a tear ran down her cheek. 


***


"The International Cowbell Prize Committee is pleased to present not one, but TWO awards to the same person...one for physics and one for world peace...to Twilight Sparkle!"

An auditorium of distinguished guests applauded and cheered. The dignitaries joyously honored the brilliant young woman who had saved their faith in the future, and prevented a worldwide descent into fear, anguish, and nihilistic chaos. They revered the woman who had given the world confidence once again, that yes, tomorrow really would be another day, not endless night or something even worse.

Twilight cried as she walked towards the stage to receive her prizes. She'd come to terms with the dishonest decision she'd made eighteen months ago. 

In her heart she knew the truth about the awards she'd come all the way to Owlslo to receive. 

She supposed maybe she really had earned one of them.