//------------------------------// // Ch. 12 Klein Bottle // Story: Dash of Humanity 3: Live, Fly, Reboot. // by Kaidan //------------------------------// I had been running down a path in the Everfree forest at night, the shouts of ponies in the distance trying to track me down. The full moon lit the path enough for me to not trip. It all seemed so familiar, like I’d been here before. I slowed down and looked around, noticing a saddlebag on my back. I reached into it, pulling the Element of Loyalty out. It dawned on me that I must be dreaming, and that this was the night I’d faced down Discord. His plan was to use me to break the Element of Loyalty, and it had nearly worked. I wasn’t particularly loyal or fun to be around, at least at first. Once I got to know the ponies, I had decided to do something selfless to save Dash and her friends. “Re-runs?” A voice asked. “How long have you been stuck in that time-loop if you’ve got nothing better to dream of?” I looked up and saw Discord standing in the clearing, wearing a pair of sunglasses and surrounded by sunlight. The moon was gone, and the leaves had formed a clearing around him. “Discord?” “The one and only.” He snapped his fingers and a radio started to play. It took me a moment to recognize the song. “My Chemical Romance? Well at least it’s not the Smile song.” I glared up at him. “So, figment of my imagination, what do you want?” “I want you to free me.” I laughed. “Fat chance. You’re dead. Plus this is just a dream, which means you have no power here.” “Banished, not dead. It is true, however, I only have the power here you think I have. I suppose it’ll have to do, we’ve got a score to settle.” I leapt forward and jabbed a hoof out into his face, wiping the grin off as he fell backward to the ground. As soon as we landed I started stomping down on his face as he laughed like a maniac, not even trying to avoid the punches. Despite it being a dream I started to pant, finally stopping to catch my breath. “I love violence.” Discord spit a tooth out, which promptly came to life and skittered off into the forest like a rat. “Glad to see the ponies haven’t erased all of your personality. Feel free to dream of me again anytime you get homesick.” “Dawn?” a voice behind me asked. I looked back to see Luna standing there, then looked back down but the Discord in my dream was gone. “What was that?” “You shouldn’t dream of him,” Luna said. “Why not? It’s just a dream.” Luna stepped into the clearing as the forest returned to night, but brightly lit by silver moonlight. All signs of Discord’s presence had faded. “A tantabus is a nightmare given shape, with all the powers the dreamer imagines it to have. A tantabus of Discord would be problematic; it is for that reason I monitor closely for any signs of one. Ever since my own guilt nearly escaped the dream realm and terrorized Ponyville, it’s a chance I can’t afford to take.” I nodded, and was about to say something when it finally dawned on me. “Wait, Luna! You’re really here?” She raised an eyebrow. “Yes? Why wouldn’t I be?” “I’m trapped in a time loop and I have been for months! I’ve dreamed, but haven’t seen you, except that first day with the zombies. It’s been ages and I need your help! You have to get word to Celestia, you have to do something to get me free!” I continued rambling on, not giving her a chance to respond. “Please, I’m at my wit’s end, I’ve studied almost everything, checked almost everypony, I don’t know how to fix time magic!” Luna had to put her hoof on my muzzle before I finally stopped to take a breath. Her horn lit up and the moonlight intensified. I felt an icy chill in my bones as her magic washed over me, yet it wasn’t painful. I recognized the spell, and could almost see the shapes of the rune words and sigils. This kind of magic had been mentioned when I was studying with the unicorns. At its core it was a medical diagnostic spell, but it also seemed to be reaching back in my mind and reading my memories all at once. “Dawn, you’re injured. What’s happened to you?” Luna inquired. It took me a moment to focus and remember. “Oh, I sort of fired myself out of a rail gun to break the sound barrier, and it worked! Until I hit the castle. It’s okay though, it heals when I restart the loop.” She gave me an incredulous look, horn lighting again and magic surrounding me. “A rail gun?” Luna sighed. “I will always be puzzled by the pegasi predilection for flying at unsafe velocities.” The spell slowly faded and her tone took a hard edge like a parent scolding a colt. “You should be more careful. I can sense deep magical scars. Until we can fix this, perhaps don’t recklessly endanger yourself?” I was frowning and looking down at the ground, only looking up once it was my turn to speak. “Wait, how are we going to fix this? I’m the only one who remembers it.” “There is another… familiar somehow.” Luna looked up at the moon, losing herself in thought. The forest around me started to shimmer, and I felt a pull as I started to wake up. “Wait, we haven't fixed this yet! Quick, tell me something only you would know so we don’t waste any time next time you find my dream!” Reality seemed to warp through a fish-eyed lens as my only hope of aid was slowly drifting away. Luna shouted to me from the distance. “Poughkeepsie.” Come on everypony smile, smile, smile Fill my heart up with sunshine, sunshine If you ask a mare they’ll say an unmedicated childbirth is the most painful thing you can experience. If they’re a stallion, maybe it’d be a kidney stone. If you asked me, I’d say it was waking up after hitting a magical crystal castle wall while traveling at seven hundred sixty miles per hour. The song on the radio continued to play as I recovered from what I assume being a puddle felt like. I slowly remembered what a limb was and managed to get one out from under the cover and turn the alarm off. “You win, Luna, no more abusing my immortality.” I laid there for another hour before finally getting up and getting ready for my day, reciting the word Luna had told me to make sure it was committed to my memory. That was the thing about dreams, it was very easy to forget them once you got out of bed and got ready for your day. It was two hours after my alarm had gone off that I finally made it into Rarity’s boutique. Minuette had gone to fetch some relevant books so we could study and Rarity was baking some cookies. I may have told her that chocolate chip cookies were an essential reagent to fixing the time loop. Which left me time to explain my exploits to Lyra. “So for the next loop, I had to pick somepony who’d be an easy mark for the prank. Next day, I dyed my whole coat, mane, and tail gray, so I looked like eighty years old.” Lyra nodded her head. “Following you so far.” “I waited until she was out making a quick visit to say good morning to Applejack, and I swooped down just after bucking a cloud to send a flash of lightning across the sky. I land and say, ‘You’ve gotta come back with me, Rarity! Back to the future! It’s our kids, Rarity!’ And she just stands there like she forgot how to speak, and I hear Applejack barely holding her laughter in.” “Oh, I think I recognize this one,” Lyra chuckled. “Yeah, I think I’ve shared that movie with you before. Right, so then I grab her by the hoof and pull her over to this racing chariot I rented for the day, complete with two pegasi to pull it. Rarity finally says ‘What’s going on? This is a racing chariot, the roads in Ponyville aren’t big enough.’ I finish pushing her into the vehicle and hop on. Right before I crack the reins to tell the stallions to take off, I say—” Lyra grinned and said with me. “Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads.” Lyra and I laughed together, and a moment later the door opened. Minuette came back in and began setting down books on the table. Rarity came back with some cookies for us to snack on, and they quickly began to levitate off the plate. I grabbed a couple out of the green glow surrounding them, and tossed them into my own mouth. “Alright, Dawn, are you ready to get down to brass tacks?” Minuette asked. I hastily chewed and swallowed. “So what are we learning today?” “Time, the universe, and everything.” “It’s forty-two, right?” I replied. “Um, no. Fourth dimension stuff.” “Yay,” I said unenthusiastically, “I’m sure that won’t at all be as confusing as imaginary numbers.” “What’s so hard about those?” Lyra asked. “Are you kidding? They’re literally made-up, so they can equal anything I want, therefore I should not have failed that test in college!” I complained. “Well, this may be a good segway into thinking about dimensions beyond the three we exist in.” Minuette took a bite of cookie on her way over to a chalkboard, and began to draw a series of graphs on it. “You brought this on yourself, Dawn,” Rarity stated. “Anything I can do to help, Minuette?” “Yeah, I’ll need a cube made of a transparent material for later,” Minuette said. Rarity nodded and left the room to make one. “Now, Dawn. Imaginary numbers were initially discovered when trying to find all the places a cubic equation met the x-axis.” “Oh no.” I slumped on the desk defeated. “She wasn’t kidding.” Lyra shrugged, “It’s not that hard, we learned about it in—” “If you say magic kindergarten, I’m resetting the loop and duct taping you to your ceiling,” I pouted. “Come on, Dawn,” Minuette said. “I’ll make it quick and you’ve already learned more than most unicorns. If you’re going to understand time travel, you’re going to want to understand the fundamentals.” I glared at her for a moment and finally answered. “Fine.” She smiled and began drawing on the graph again. “Okay, so a cubic equation can only cross the X axis once in the real plane, but there are still two other roots, which are in the imaginary plane. So in order to solve this type of equation, we must use a third imaginary plane to help describe those places that cross the real plane of the x and y axis.” “It’s coming back to me. So we have a real x and y axis, and an imaginary x and y axis, to solve the math problem.” “Yes.” Minuette had drawn a small graph on the chalkboard. “In a way, time travel is the same. To solve the equation for time travel, you must use dimensions that aren’t real as an intermediary step. We live in three dimensions. Up and down, left and right, forward and back. Like the math problem, these are the only real dimensions we can observe.” “But we can see time,” I interrupted. “The past, the present, the future.” “We can’t see it. We’re basically stuck on train tracks, only moving forward, but that’s not quite the right analogy for what I want to teach you today.” I smirked as I got out of my seat, feeling emboldened by my recent vacation. “Before you say anything else about imaginary numbers, I Just want to say one thing.” Minuette and Lyra looked over at me. “Oh?” I reached out and took Minuette’s hoof and began to sing. “We’re no strangers to love. You know the rules, and so do I! A full commitm—” “Dawn Seeker!” Pinkie shouted, appearing in an explosion of confetti that sent Minuette tumbling backward into the wall. “You Pinkie Promised to stop being such a smart-flank and joking around during lessons!” “Gah!” I shouted, losing my own footing in the process of her arrival. I looked around, heart racing, as Pinkie was just suddenly there in my face. She didn’t use a door, or a window, or even a potted plant, and it nearly caused my heart to stop. “You also know better than to mess with the RIAA, or Baskin Robbins!” Pinkie looked up at the ceiling and sighed. “Somehow they always catch me.” Lyra continued to munch on a cookie, unphased and more used to Pinkie than either of us. “This is serious!” Pinkie continued, “like when I have to report my income for taxes, or when Mrs. Cake has the fire marshall or health inspector visiting!” “I… what the buck, Pinkie?” Minuette exclaimed. She’d gotten back to her hooves, and her mouth opened and closed a few times as she tried to think of what to say. “Uh, let’s hear her out,” I mumbled, anxious to avoid the consequences of a broken Pinkie Promise. Pinkie stopped glaring at me and looked over at the unicorn. “This… this isn’t possible. Pinkie, you’re not physically possible!” Minuette began to rant. “This is a closed time loop, you can not have awareness of the loops, or memories of past loops! Even if I accept you somehow knew Dawn was screwing around, which I don’t, how did you just appear?!” Lyra, Pinkie, and I all chimed out at once. “Pinkie sense.” “What?” the exasperated unicorn asked. She was still panting from the initial shock of Pinkie’s appearance. “You’ve got a lot to learn about this town,” I chuckled. “I heard Twilight burst into flames once trying to figure it out. I was only here for like three days before I gave up. Trust me, don’t try to figure it out.” Minuette looked over at Pinkie one last time. “Fine, I need some water.” She turned to go, leaving me to face Pinkie’s wrath. “Did you not throw her a Welcome to Ponyville party?” I asked. “This should have all been covered in orientation.” “Don’t try and distract me,” Pinkie said in a commanding tone of voice. “You’re supposed to be studying and fixing this. You wouldn’t believe how itchy I’ve been getting lately! And this isn’t even the first Pinkie Promise you’ve broken.” “What? I haven’t broken a single promise this whole loop, until now. You can’t even prove it if I did!” She reached into her mane and pulled out a hardcover book with a nice fake leather grain and gold trim. I didn’t catch the title, but Pinkie had quickly flipped it open and began reading from it. “Aha, here you’re breaking the promise, and here… at least a dozen times! I shouldn’t have let you out of my sight.” “Pinkie, just what is that?” I got to my hooves and went over to see what she was reading from. “Have you got some kind of journal?” “Nope. This is your memoir.” “His memoir?” Lyra asked, walking up on the other side of Pinkie to take a look for herself. “Yep. Dawn wrote a tell all story about his adventures with you know who and fixing the time loop!” Pinkie said with a smile. “You know who? Do you know who is responsible for this, Pinkie?” I asked. “Nope! You know who it is though! You wrote the book after all.” I started to feel like how Minuette, and Twilight before her, must have felt as my brain skidded to a halt. The gears were jammed, possibly melting, as I tried to add this up. “Wait, you’re saying that this book contains my memoir on fixing this time loop that I am currently in and couldn’t possibly have written yet?” “Yeppers! See?” Pinkie handed the book over to me. I lifted it up in a hoof and began to read from it. Rarity lifted up the red dress and took it off the display, hanging it onto a rack. “Sometimes you sound just like Dash. Well then, what brings you by today?” She shuffled through some more clothing before finding something that she liked, putting it onto the now bare ponnequin. “Oh, so I’m stuck in a time loop and I’m checking in with my friends to see if anyone has any bright ideas. I’ll also accept secret basement laboratories, emergency supplies, or some sort of counter-spell.” I sat down on the floor. “Holy shit, she’s telling the truth!” “Language!” Pinkie complained. “This book actually happened? So I can skip ahead to find some answers!” “Wow, talk about convenient,” Lyra added. She stepped over and looked down as I flipped ahead to a random page and started reading. The whip bit deep into my flank, sending a hot sharp jolt of pain racing up my spine. The leather strained as I tried to pull away from the pony hellbent on teaching me some manners. I quickly flipped ahead, hoping Lyra didn’t have time to read that page. “Uh, we’ll skip that part, uh, nothing to see here… how are you?” Pinkie gave me a knowing grin. “Stop there.” She tapped a hoof on a page. “Huh? This looks like it hasn’t happened yet. What am I looking at?” I asked, opening the page for all of us to read. “You’re looking at now,” Pinkie explained to her confused friends. “Everything that happens now, is happening now, Dawn.” “What happened to then?” I asked, looking back and forth between the words on the page and the pink earth pony to my side. “We passed it.” “When?” “Just now.” Pinkie turned the page, so we could continue reading. “We’re at now, now.” “Wait, Pinkie, go back to then,” I said. “When?” “Now!” “Now?” “Yes, Now!” She turned the page back. “I can’t go back to now,” Pinkie stated. “We missed it.” “When?” “Just now!” I sighed, rubbing my temples as I wondered if it was possible to get a spontaneous migraine from proximity to Pinkie Pie. “When will then be now?” “Soon, I promise.” “Um,” Lyra interrupted. “Dawn, as much as I enjoy whatever—” she gestured with a hoof to Pinkie, myself, and the book, “—this is, why don’t you just flip to the last page and see how to fix it?” “Ah, spoilers are no fun!” Pinkie complained. “She has a point though.” I wouldn’t have been able to maintain my sanity for much longer at that rate anyway. “Last page of the book and… it’s blank?” I began to flip backwards from the end of the book, finding that half the book was empty. “Well, of course! It hasn’t happened yet,” Pinkie took the book back, flipping it back to chapter twelve. “See? This is as far as you’ve gotten.” “No,” I whined. “But, you, the book, from the future, none of it’s happened yet! But I already wrote it… so how has it not been written yet?” “Don’t hate the player, hate the game, Dawnie.” Pinkie shoved the book back into her mane. “No wait!” I jabbed my hoof into her mane, feeling it poke out the other side. “Damn it! What was the point of this whole ordeal?” Pinkie giggled and gave me a hug. “Not everything needs a point, life would be boring if it did. Now, I’m willing to postpone the punishment for all those broken promises, but I will be keeping count! So you better be on your best behavior Mister!” I had never wanted so badly to understand the insanity that was Pinkie, or to hit her, I couldn’t quite make up my mind. After trying and failing to figure out how she could help me, I decided to just let her go and focus on the very important lesson with Minuette she had interrupted. “Fine, Pinkie. Thanks for… whatever that was. I’m sure if you were going to help you would have, or already have, who knows how this time travel crap works.” “Minuette does! She’s gonna explain it all now that she’s downed a double dose of tylenol. Take care! Nice to see you again, Lyra!” “Nice to see you—” Lyra sighed, looking around the room. I followed her gaze, realizing Pinkie had vanished as suddenly as she appeared. “I never get used to that.” “Tell me about it,” I echoed. “She has got to be related to Discord or something.” Minuette returned to the room and began clearing off a table. “We’re ready for the important part of the explanation. I’ll thank everypony not to mention Pinkie again so the loop can reset and I can forget the rat’s nest of a paradox I just overheard from the other room.” Rarity followed shortly after with the scratch paper and a small clear cube and set them on the table. Minuette hurried over and used her magic to cut a few squares out, then drew a room on a large piece of paper and put a square inside it. I glanced down at the page. The room drawn on the paper had 4 walls and a small door, forming a little two-dimensional home. The black paper square must have represented a little square person to live in the house. “If this square lived in a two dimensional world, this room would look solid to it, these squares outside couldn’t see it. However, to us, who exist in a third dimension, we can look down on the square and see it inside the room. The same holds true if a fourth-dimensional being were to look down on us in our three dimensional world.” “So the secret to time travel is to view this magical fourth dimension?” I asked. I moved one of the squares with a hoof, wondering how it would look if I was also flat. In two dimensions, I’d only be able to see a line, and perhaps the line would have shading. Nothing would really have any depth. However, since I was a pony looking down on the paper, it was almost like I existed in a higher plane of existence than the little crafting paper shapes. “The secret to time travel, which I’ll thank you not to repeat, is to view the shadow of the fourth dimension. We exist in three dimensions and can’t see the fourth one.” Lyra and Rarity both looked lost. “Okay, we’re all truly confused now.” “And you weren’t when—” Minuette’s glare caught my attention, “—you know who was here?” Minuette levitated the clear cube Rarity had made onto the table, and the sunlight hit it just right to cast a shadow. “This three dimensional cube casts a two dimensional shadow on the table.” She drew an outline of it on the table. “It should look familiar, this is much the same way we’d sketch a cube on a piece of paper. So basically, the shadow of a three dimensional object occupies two dimensions. This means a fourth dimensional object or spell can be observed by its shadow in three dimensions.” “Now, I want to keep it simple, so let's just say there are only four dimensions and that fourth one is time. I want to travel back in time and kill baby Sombra and save the Crystal Empire. However, I can’t see the dimension of time. What I can see is its shadow in the three dimensions my magic can perceive. So, by manipulating the shadow I can manipulate time itself.” I gasped as I remembered an earlier lesson on the types of magic. “Thaumaturgy?” Minuette smiled. “There’s hope for you yet. Yes. Thaumaturgy as a school states ‘As it is above, so it is below.’ You make something happen on what you can see and link it to what you can’t see. Some mane hair and a doll, and you’ve got a voodoo doll that can affect a pony you can’t see. We’ll use it in a similar way, to manipulate the shadow of time we can observe, and thus manipulate time itself. However, because you can’t actually see what you’re doing directly, it’s very error prone.” “So we’ll be poking the shadow of time to try and get the dimension in the next room we can’t see to do what we want, and hope it doesn’t get broken and un-exist us. Sounds fun!” She let out a sigh and nodded. “One of the lesser known rumors is that Starswirl got so good at it, he became able to perceive the fourth dimension and ascended to a higher plane of existence. If you ask me though, he probably created some sort of paradox that trapped or killed him.” “Yeah, I can see why. I can’t imagine trying to screw with the forces of the universe based on the fact I can sorta make out their shadow.” “If anypony could truly master time, they could travel anywhere, anytime, with the push of a button or the glow of the horn. It is truly terrifying to consider a pony could be looking down on us unseen, with as much power over us as we have over this square of paper. Let’s say that Discord had been able to perceive four dimensions, we’d have been ants for him to use a magnifying glass on.” Minuette pointed a hoof at the cutout bit of paper from earlier, before her magic incinerated it. “Well let’s hope we’re not dealing with any pissed off demigods, because I did that once, and once is enough. So we're still looking for a unicorn?” I asked. “Yeah, and one that’s royally screwed up. I went to check the barrier while I was getting these books.” Minuette went back to the chalkboard and quickly sketched out a map of Ponyville. There was a large circular shape encompassing the entire town. “This was the confusing part. Why would a time spell create a barrier? What’s the point of keeping ponies in or out? Is the spell contained to Ponyville, or all of Equestria?” She came back over and began to draw a smaller cube inside the shadow of the larger cube, letting her thought process carry her through the explanation. “Thinking about how to dumb it down for you, no offense Dawn, brought me to a realization about this spell. The barrier around Ponyville is part of the shadow of time, and time has been fractured.” I nodded and poked a hoof onto the inner cube drawn in the shadow of the outer one. “Your new drawing here is the shadow of time. Whoever broke time, fractured it around Ponyville, trapping us in here. When I touched the barrier, the day reset instantly. To fix the spell, we need to fix the barrier because it’s actually the shadow of the spell.” “Exactly!” Minuette grinned brightly. “Now that we’ve advanced your knowledge about as far as we can on magic, we can start studying the barrier together to find a solution. Since we don’t know who cast this spell or how, our only option is to work backwards from the shadow of the damage to fix it.” “The barrier is so geometric, if it’s the shadow of the damaged stuff we can’t see, what are the odds it’d be a near perfect circle?” I thought out loud. “I mean, I’d almost expect time to unravel or something. The damage could spread, or you could just blink right out of existence when crossing it.” “I can’t say, yet. Studying the nature of the barrier should help. It will also answer the question of whether the rest of Equestria is looping with us. I’d definitely recommend not touching the barrier again.” Minuette’s horn lit up and she slid a piece of paper to the edge of the table. “You could quite literally fall out of our three dimensions if you did manage to touch a damaged enough section.” The small black square fell off the table, toppling to the ground. I groaned and rubbed my head as I felt a headache coming on. “This is why I like medicine, it’s so simple! Give me a pulmonary edema to fix any day. Hell, I’ll disimpact all the bowels if I don’t have to fix a time loop again.” “Hey, you’re doing great,” Lyra said. “She lost me back with the square piece of paper metaphor.” “I’m afraid I didn’t understand much after the imaginary numbers,” Rarity added. “Alright.” I got out of my chair and stretched. “I need to use the restroom; why don’t you go ahead and start towards Fluttershy’s cottage. It’s remote and near the barrier. I’ll catch up.” Minuette started levitating the books into her saddlebag. “I have a few instruments at home that may help take measurements, if I can remember where I packed them. Lyra, will you come with me and help me with them?” “Sure thing, Minuette.” Lyra opened the door and they both walked outside. “I had better go check on Sweetie Belle. I know she’s out crusading today and it’s been awfully quiet,” Rarity said. I headed into the bathroom and closed the door, shouting as I peed so she could hear me. “Oh, they’re in the Everfree forest building a railgun! It works remarkably well, I might add. I look forward to your continued lack of adult supervision, because I think they may invent a spaceship next and I’d pay good bits to see that!” “They’re what?!” Rarity screamed. “And you’re just telling me this now?” I heard the door slam as a panicked unicorn ran off to rescue her sister, for all the good it would do. I flushed the toilet and washed my hooves off, heading outside to try and catch up. As I walked through town, I noticed a crowd of ponies ahead, and some shouting. It reminded me of the crowd that gathered when I hadn't been able to rescue the construction pony one morning. I felt a pit in my stomach as I hurried forward and began to push my way through the crowd. When I made it up to the clearing, I found two ponies lying dead in the street, their fur burnt as if hit by fire or lightning. I glanced up, seeing only clear skies, and back down. A feeling of rage was rising up as I stared down at the corpses of Lyra and Minuette. “Who did this?” I glanced around, but nopony was talking. A few were backing away from me, as my wings were flared and my connection to the weather had lightning dancing from the tips of my feathers. Somepony had chosen to kill two ponies in cold blood, and somepony would pay. In the distance, I saw a mare that screamed guilty. She was wearing a hooded cloak, and instantly ducked behind a building when she saw me look in their direction. Thunder cracked and I heard ponies shouting as I took off into the air. The lightning danced around me, hitting the ground, as thoughts of beating somepony half to death filled my mind. I whipped around the corner of the building, then the next corner, catching up to the mysterious hooded pony. A blue sphere formed around her as I slammed into the shield, and in an instant I felt all the electricity from my wing tips grounded into the spell, seeming to short circuit it for just a moment. My forelegs connected with the pony, slamming her backwards and onto the ground. The pony reminded me of Twilight. Her fur was a light pinkish-purple, and her mane was a darker purple. There was a mint green stripe in her hair. “Who the fuck are you?” I shouted. She looked up at me in terror, but only for a moment, before beginning to laugh. “You’re just a worthless pegasus.” Her horn began to glow, so I tried stomping a hoof on it. When my hoof connected to the horn, I felt a searing jolt go up my foreleg before my heart seized and I blacked out from the surge of magic.