“Please work”
An entirely unfamiliar cold swallowed her, wrapping itself around her so completely she swore the universe had just given up on thermodynamics and nulled out the concept of ‘warm’’ entirely. Twilight watched herself stiffen up and begin to fall in slow motion, her body limp and covered with goosebumps.
‘I can see why Alpha hates this place,’ Twilight thought to herself, clumsily shifting her perceptual viewpoint around, getting a better view of her now-vacated body slumping to the floor and the other members of Team Fifteen sluggishly reacting. ‘Thought isn’t everything supposed to be frozen? It was frozen in the recording…’
She focussed, reigning in her curiosity and pulling up her old coursework. It seemed almost a lifetime ago, peaceful, serene days spent cooped up in a dark, abandoned library, poring over volume upon volume of thaumoinformatics theory as part of her undergraduate coursework. The thaumic state machine she had built as a final-year project was, in retrospect, clumsy, inefficient, and flawed in all the ways that only undergraduate work can be. She passed the course with distinction, and then went straight back to that library, burying herself in books and theory and pure, purposeless, fundamental knowledge.
For a brief, razor-sharp and terrifying moment, she wished she had stayed in that library. That she hadn’t gone after the Outsider that had caught her attention out of the corner of her eye, and instead remained within the familiar. Spending her life within academia, filled with distinction and accolade, to be sure, but it would have been quiet. Excitement of the sort that brings light chuckles and small smiles over cups of tea, not that which brings terror and exhaustion from the endless running. No other worlds, no copies of her, no hundreds of thousands of ponies killed in a poorly-thought-out moment of deception and revenge.
It was what could have been.
It was irrelevant.
Romantic, terrifying, and irrelevant. With care and specificity that only an academic could wield, she plucked out the nuggets of theory absorbed over far too many weeks spent alone in that library, and plugged them together into a nearly-flawless reproduction of a first-year thaumoinformatic seek spell. With barely a thought, she fired the spell, a wordless ping echoing back into her mind as an affirmative confirmation of its execution.
‘Where am I?’ She asked of the spell. For a moment, she feared she had assembled it wrong, before information slowly asserted itself in her mind, an answer built letter-by-letter and out of order, only comprehensible once fully assembled.
The Library
She swivelled her viewpoint around. An accurate, if basic answer, that at the very least proved the spell was compiled correctly. Lyra’s hoof was moving, reaching for the crystal stuck to Twilight’s comatose head. There was time for only one more question before she was forced back into reality, and, twilight realised with detached horror, she couldn’t tell if her vacated body was breathing or not. Time was running critically thin.
‘I need a teleport solution from my body’s current position to the commander center of Operations’’
Seconds passed, then a full minute, then more. Lyra’s hoof moved further towards the crystal, Walleye had turned her head to see what the commotion was about. Against all sensibility, Theta still clung to her back like a furry pink limpet.
It was taking too long. Twilight could feel the spell arrangements being pieced together by the spell, again formed out of order and individually useless without the complete set. Much as she willed the spell to work faster, it was constrained by the limited processing resources at its disposal, along with its own rushed assembly.
Lyra reached for the crystal, missing it by fractions of a hoofwidth as Twilight’s comatose form began to crumple. Walleye had visibly stiffened, reacting to what, from her perspective, looked very much like Twilight had been neutralised by a sniper. Rainboom was already ducking and moving to cover, having reached the same conclusion already. Pinkie, seemingly out of nowhere, was beside her, hooves already reaching to cushion her fall.
Twilight could only watch with increasing unease as the scene played out in slow motion. Walleye and Rainboom ducking for cover. Lyra’s second, and then third frantic, failed attempts to knock the crystal off, the latter seemingly connecting, but from Twilight’s dilated perspective she couldn’t tell if it was true, or a trick of perception.
Time dragged on, until the spell finally returned, dumping the finalized spell arrangement into her awareness, just as her head contacted the ground and jostled the crystal loose.
“...Off her!” Lyra yelled, before freezing as Twilight’s eyes snapped open.
Twilight blinked, twisting her head around to stare at Walleye and Rainboom, their search for an assailant abruptly interrupted by Twilight’s return to consciousness, and then to Pinkie, her concerned expression still lingering.
“Right,” Twilight groaned, pulling herself upright again, gingerly igniting her horn and levitating the spire crystal back into her saddlebags. “Not doing that again.”
“Are you going to even tell us what ‘that’ was?” Rainboom asked, irritated.
“I have a plan,” Twilight asserted, collecting the hammer that had fallen to the floor beside her. “Long-range teleportation within the Exterior is ostensibly impossible, until Celestia Alpha went and did it to get that crystal to me the first time around.”
“And what, you think you’re as good as she is?”
“The crystal helped her. It gave her the spell to escape, and that little crystal just gave me the spell to get to Operations first.”
“In any case, If I haven’t completely exhausted your...” She paused, weighing different choices. “Sense of duty, Walleye, Rainboom, I require your aid...”
“What?” Walleye interrupted, incredulous.
“To stop this.”
“You really think that plan is going to work?” Walleye snorted. “You might fool these three with that sort of optimism, but I know better. They’re not going to just stand down because you captured a leader. Remember? They are desperate. No matter what tricks you think you have with dropping a mountain from the sky and taming Theta, they’re not going to care, they’re here because their home is dead, and they don’t mind using violence to take mine.”
She paused, taking a breath.
“So, what, you’re giving up?”
“No, I’m just not going to throw my life away on some feather-brained plan that has no chance of working.”
“Not two minutes ago you were getting ready to die in a last stand against them?”
“At least it was my choice!”
“And what, because this idea is mine that makes it have less merit?”
“You’re more likely to get us killed yourself than to save the day! ADMIT IT!”
“I AM NOT YOUR ENEMY!”
An uncomfortable silence settled over the group.
“Look, I get it,” Twilight said, slowly. “I can see why you’re scared of me. I’m scared of me. In the last few days I’ve been shown a world beyond what I could have possibly imagined. It will take me a lifetime to make sense of it, and I fully intend to spend that lifetime doing exactly that, because the alternative is that I run back home to my study and my books and try in vain to forget all of this.”
She took a breath, forcing down the tremor growing in her hoof-tips.
“But we are wasting time. Every second we argue is one second less before they reach Operations and our opportunity closes. Then we’re back to a straight fight, dying ponies everywhere, and absolutely no chance in Tartarus of this being over.”
Walleye huffed, taking a long look around the room, and then back to Twilight.
“I mean to be fair,” Rainboom interjected. “We were doing the whole heroic-last-stand thing, boss. What difference does it make if it’s in Ops instead of here? I never really wanted to die in a library, of all places.”
Walleye chuckled.
“In any case,” Rainboom continued, turning to Twilight. “Bossfight, yeah?”
“I… suppose,” Twilight answered, tentatively. “Yes.”
“Bossfight. I’m in.”
“Seems I don’t have much of a choice, does it?” Walleye smirked.
“And what about us?” Lyra asked, indicating herself and Pinkie. “Just wait here for them to come back and kill us?”
“No,” Twilight replied. “The ponies in Canterlot need to be told of what’s going on. If we fail like Walleye thinks we’re going to, they need to know what they’re facing if they have any chance of survival”
“Anything I should expect for this?” Walleye asked.
“Teleportation doesn’t hurt,” Twilight replied. “Though I can’t be sure for this variant specifically. You should be fine. Celestia was when she used the same spell to escape the first time around.”
“Apart from that?”
“You mean apart from the imminent death from gunfire?” Rainboom quipped.
Walleye shot her a withering look.
“Ok, ready,” Twilight said, slotting the spell components together in her mind. “Shall we?”
Twilight ignited the spell.
-----
Obediently, the spell discharged.
Twilight’s nose immediately wrinkled, the still-lingering acrid aroma of soot and thaumic residue from the days-previous assault on Operations assaulting her senses and disrupting her focus. Rainboom and Walleye were immediately in motion, darting for cover behind the myriad chairs and eltrich panels that made up the de-facto brain of Operations.
On an ordinary day, the space would be filled by easily two dozen ponies, creating an impression not unlike an angry swarm of bees as they coordinated the unceasing operation of the Exterior’s hundreds of Operations teams, surrounded and supported by thousands more throughout the Spire chamber. Today, it was empty, save for two Sparkles, both clad in heavyset Outsider gear, and clearly in the middle of a heated argument before Team Fifteen had interrupted.
Twilight raised a hoof, tentatively, realising that she had left herself unavoidable exposed.
“Before you try anything,” She began. “Just be warned that the fuzzy ping ball on my back is Theta, and i’m not sure how well she’s going to react to violence in her current state.”
The moment dragged out, before shattering as the two Sparkles answered in unison.
“YOU”
“I… sorry?”
One of them stepped forward, carefully, her horn already ignited. “Why is it always you? The moment I met you everything just started going sideways! I was this close.”
“What?”
“Oh don’t deny it,” the Sparkle continued. “You come here with that ‘I don’t want to kill anypony’ attitude, I should have known it was a ruse. I should never have believed Alpha. How long ago did she recruit you?”
“You… have completely lost me”
“Horseapples. I run smack into a Sparkle on a world where there is no recorded Sparkles, drag her back here, seemingly by accident, and then suddenly you’ve got your hoof in everything i’m doing, and you expect me to believe this isn’t deliberate?”
“...Echo?”
“I should have killed you the moment I met you,” Echo asserted.
“I don’t know what I was expecting,” Twilight began. “But this wasn’t it.”
“And you think for a moment,” Echo continued. “That I believe that that ball of plush on your back is Theta? It took me years to enamour myself with her, find her spots, how to calm her down, convince her. She would eat you for breakfast.”
Almost on cue, the ball ruffled, the barest outlines of wings and a horn shifting on its surface before a single, baleful blue eye opened, staring at Echo.
“...no.” Echo breathed. “That’s not possible.”
“Hey, uh…” The third Sparkle began, focussing on Rainboom. “Aren’t you supposed to be dead?”
“No?” Rainboom replied, confused. “Why? Did you try?”
“Well…”
“Oh buck me,” Rainboom swore. “I remember! You’re that nag from the Dark Exterior that we found! You tried to kill me!”
“Tried?” The Sparkle replied. “You would not have been the first to die from that trick. It always works. You should be dead.”
“You had them dead to rights,” Echo growled, rounding on the Sparkle. “You had all of them dead to rights, and not only did you fail, the one pony you were absolutely sure was dead is still alive, here, pointing guns at us.”
The Sparkle grimaced, stepping back slowly.
“Look,” She began. “I threw her into the Void. No-pony comes back from that. It’s not my fault if they had a Sombra-Sparkle on their team, especially one picked by one of your Celestias. It’s over, you got outplayed.”
Echo’s eye twitched.
“Hey, uh,” The Sparkle continued, stepping around Echo carefully. “I’m smart enough to know what’s going down, especially after that last trick you pulled. I surr…”
Her words died in her throat with a sharp crack that echoed throughout the room. Twilight blinked for a moment, startled, before spotting the lavender glow around the back of the Sparkle’s neck.
“We’re not surrendering,” Echo asserted, releasing her grip and letting the Sparkles now-lifeless body slump to the floor. “I am not surrendering”
“You didn’t need to do that,” Twilight whispered.
“Oh?” Echo responded, sneering. “Is one more dead pony too much for you? Do you get it now? I told you that this is the way of this world. Do you get it now?”
“This ends now,” Twilight breathed.
“Does it?” Echo shouted back, her horn glowing brighter. “You think you’re going to stop me? The coward from the pacifict world?”
Twilight paused, her hammer lowering slightly.
“I stopped your pet,” She replied. “I can stop you too.”
“Big deal. I stopped her too.”
“No. You seduced her. I stopped her. There is a difference.”
Twilight stepped forward, the glow around her hammer brightening as she tightened her mental grip.
“I ripped an entire universe from its moorings to stop her, but I did it. The best you could do to flatter her and somehow convince her to not kill you immediately, in return for, I don’t know, free reign to murder as she pleased? I don’t know. To be honest, I don’t care.”
She took another step forward, motes of black and green popping into existence around the base of her horn.
“I have taken on two different versions of myself and survived. I fought a mountain and won. I dropped a moon on an alicorn. I survived. After all that, do you really think that you are in any way a credible threat to me?”
The motes solidified, arcs of black lightning flaring into existence around them as she levelled the hammer at Echo.
“I could drop this entire room into the Void right now.”
Echo glared back at her, her eyes flicking between Twilight’s face, the hammer, and the two pegasi who had weapons trained on her head. Twilight glared back, a trio of spells dropping into place in her mind behind a mental hair-trigger, the point of darkness in her mind held tight at hand.
Echo opened her mouth, hesitating slightly.
“Bullsh…”
Twilight reacted, the spells triggering autonomously as she moved almost too fast to see, closing the distance as a point of light appeared behind Echo, discharging a thin purple beam towards the back of her head.
Echo gasped, the hammer’s haft pressing into her throat as Twilight held her to the floor in a telekinetic vice grip, purple tendrils enveloping her horn and solidifying.
“Wrong answer,” Twilight growled.
She concentrated, closing the tap of Void energy in her mind and breathing a sigh of relief as it closed without resistance. Taking care not to release her grip on Echo, she ripped the communications stalk from the dead Sparkle’s uniform, floating it to Walleye.
“Get on this and get the army coming at us to stand down,” Twilight ordered. “Tell them that I’ve captured their ringleader. This other Sparkle seemed willing enough to surrender, maybe the rest will show sense.”
“Yeah,” Walleye replied, taking the stalk. “Alright.”
“And if that doesn’t convince them, feel free to drop the fact that I was the one that thwarted their attack at Bastion, and the survivors of that attack will be coming up behind them pretty quick to return the favor.”
“Wait,” Rainboom interrupted, poking her head up. “Is that it? That was the bossfight?”
“Yes,” Twilight replied, charging a stunner spell and aiming it squarely into Echo’s face. “That’s it.”
She fired.
“It’s over.”