Nothingness.
Coldness.
Wet, hard floor.
Pain.
Starlight coughed and tried to stand up. Her hooves shook and gave way under her. Dimly she recalled that last time she’d done this. Back then, she’d had the spell committed to parchment. It had helped to channel her thoughts for the first few jumps. Now, years later, her memory held it quite imperfectly.
She shivered as she stood up, leaning against the stall door and cackling. She’d lived through the ordeal, after all.
She coughed – and tensed as she heard someone open the bathroom door.
An unsteady set of hoofsteps, a creak of a stall door next to her. Then – silence.
Her mind was still swimming and her temples throbbed with pain.
Starlight groped for the door as she heard a flush. She stumbled out of the stall and leaned against the sink. A moment later, she managed to turn the water on and splash some on her face.
As she watched the water spiral down into the drain, she winced.
“Why did I have to turn into the mare I’m in love with?!” she whined.
The stall door behind her creaked again.
Suddenly, Starlight was filled with a horrible sense of déjà vu. She froze.
The pony behind her gasped.
That single sound was enough to uncoil all of the tension inside Starlight. She jumped up to the ceiling like a spring, and spun around as soon as her hooves were on solid ground. She leaned back and pierced the darkness of the bathroom stall with her terrified gaze.
On a closed toilet sat a familiar blue pony with a silver-and-blue mane.
“Trixie?” Starlight blurted out.
The blue unicorn’s face went through a quick series of twitches before she grinned in the most fake way Starlight had ever seen in her life. The other unicorn jumped up and bowed.
“The one and only!” she declared and stepped shakily out of the stall. “The Grrreat and Powerfulll… Trrrrrixie!!!”
Starlight tried not to laugh.
“Am I hamming it up too much?” the fake magician asked.
“No! No…” Starlight replied. Oh sweet Celestia, I never realized how bad my impressions are.
“You’re… uh…” she tried to calm herself. “...right on the money, just…”She frowned and groped for reality.“Trixie doesn’t talk in first person that much.” Each word anchored her. “She’d probably say something like…”She batted her eyelashes and puckered her lips. “Is Trrrrixie hamming it up enough?”
Trixie snickered. That snicker alone would have been a dead giveaway for anypony who’d known Starlight for more than five minutes.
“Your… performance is pretty good, too!” Trixie – no, past-Starlight – commented. She walked beside Starlight and turned the water on. Starlight watched her and tried not to stare. And failed.
“I bet it is…” she muttered. “Yours is slipping a bit, though.”
This was just too bizarre. Starlight had traveled through time before, but she had never interacted with herself. What if she said something wrong? Would she undo time itself or something?
“Tell me, then!” her past self blurted out in a voice shaky with barely contained curiosity. “Did the Great and Powerful Trixie hear you say that you…” she lowered her voice into a shaky whisper, “...you turned into the pony you are in love with?”
Despite herself, Starlight blushed.
“I have,” she admitted. A few hours ago. “But that’s beside the point!”
“Oh, is it?” The past Starlight was on offense now. “Don't you think the Great and Powerful Trixie would want to know who is so-o desperately in love with her roommate?”
“Oh puh-lease!” Starlight waved a hoof dismissively. “You know Trixie has her own room.”
“Ha! Somepony close to her, then. But who?”
She is really going to play this game, isn’t she? Starlight asked herself. Then again, she had done just that when she was in her place. She still remembered how weird it felt to think that somepony was madly in love with her – somepony who had quickly turned out not to be Trixie at all.
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Starlight said sarcastically.
“You really are good at this,” the fake hummed. “That’s exactly what I –”
That slip was even more embarrassing than how she remembered it.
“...what Starlight would say, I mean,” the younger Starlight finished.
“Right…” Starlight rolled her eyes.
Wow. I am soooo subtle. Maybe I should give up my day job and help Flim and Flam con ponies.
“And you’d know because…?” She would let herself stew in it for a bit.
“Trixie” looked left and right until she grinned and blurted out in an unconvincing tone: “The Great and Powerful Trixie knows many things!”
“Ah, that’s how we’re playing it then?” Starlight noted. “Alright.”
“Trixie begs your pardon?” her past self blinked.
Starlight stood up and sighed. She could only watch her past self make an idiot out of herself for so long.
“How about,” she said calmly, “we honor Thorax’s wish and play his little game?”
She couldn’t help but laugh.
So this was it. She had made the number one error of all time travelers – she had gone to the past to dispel some great catastrophe and inadvertently become the cause of it.
Great.
And probably Powerful.
“You want to know who I really am,” she told her past self.
Ah, to Tartarus with it! Actually, she might end up in Tartarus for all of this. But she’d be damned if she didn’t enjoy the little peaceful time she had left.
“And I wouldn’t mind company for the evening,” she continued. “If you can actually guess who I am…”
She shrugged. As if.
“Then you’re a better mare than I,” she finished. She reached out with her hoof. “Do we have a deal?”
Maybe she really should try to con ponies.
Her past self considered the proposition. Starlight could almost see the gears turn behind her eyes.
“Trixie accepts your challenge.” Past Starlight shook her hoof. It felt as weird as it did the first time. Where past and future meet, heh.
“How do we go about this?” the blue unicorn asked.
Starlight shrugged again.
“How about we mingle,” she smirked, “...Trixie? You ask me questions and I ask you some?”
Her younger self nodded enthusiastically. Starlight wasn’t sure if it was the guise of Trixie or something else – but she found it almost cute.
They were playing “spot-the-alicorn.” Starlight knew it had helped her calm the nerves last time. And after all, she needed some time for her own thoughts.
During her first little romp through time and space, she had gained the feeling time was a surprisingly malleable thing. After all, it had only taken a little push to erase the whole of modern Equestrian history.
She shuddered.
“Alicorn!” the pony who looked like Trixie called out. “Three o’clock, looks like Luna!”
“Didn’t we see that one already?” Starlight asked.
“This one is taller.”
“Huh. I guess you’re right.”
As strange as it was, each time Starlight had changed the present by altering the past, it had seemed as if reality itself was somehow aware of its wrongness. According to Twilight, at least, the jungle world’s Zecora had said as much. Then again, Zecora.
Starlight knew of no way to visit any such parallel worlds. She hoped they had simply disappeared each time Starlight’s meddling had created another offshoot. The alternative was that they were still out there, worlds doomed by Starlight’s vengeance. She shuddered.
“Sweet Celestia,” she muttered.
“Where?” her younger self perked up.
Starlight blinked and her eyes darted across the crowd. She jabbed her chin to the alicorn who was just entering from the gardens. “There, walking in. The color order of her mane is reversed.”
“I bet that’s Thorax,” the other unicorn noted. “A while back, he mentioned Celestia would look more interesting with her mane like that.”
“You don’t say…”
Starlight thought back to what Twilight told her about her own time travel escapades.
Apparently, Twilight herself had once used unstable magic to jump back a week, if only for a brief moment. Just long enough to give herself half of a warning – the other half of which should have been not to worry, but it seemed the universe had seen it fit to pull her back to the present before she could finish.
Thus, she’d ended up worrying for a whole week and weeding out potential disasters left and right. This had ultimately culminated in her sneaking into the Starswirl Wing of the Royal Library and stealing the very spell her older self had used. And use it she had, after realizing she worried over nothing. Of course, to try to tell her younger self not to worry over nothing, and being pulled back mid-sentence.
And so on.
“Is that Luna?” the fake Trixie asked. “She looks awfully small…”
“Her?” Starlight squinted. “Must be somepony else. Her mane is bright blue and too short.”
“The cutie mark matches. And she’s still an alicorn. Point for me!”
“That’s fair.”
Of course, what Twilight had gone through was an example of a stable time loop. Her future self had traveled back in time to influence her past self, leading to the time travel in the first place.
Just like what was happening to Starlight right now. In that sense, her current actions were determined in advance – and so were the actions of her past self, oblivious as she was to the fact.
Did that mean she’d never had any free will to begin with?
No, she shook her head. Even if there was only one path through life based on the sum of all current conditions, at the present moment she did make decisions. Maybe she was a pawn of fate, but she didn’t see fate’s hoof moving her. If fate was real, it was unknowable to her – and thus, meaningless to her personally.
Fate might as well be nothing but a record of her actions, which she could only see in hindsight. Unless she went back in time, of course. But even then, there could still be some greater context – other dimensions she could not even imagine, in which even the time loop would be nothing but a curious footnote.
“There’s a Nightmare Moon,” Starlight observed.
“That’s in pretty poor taste, isn’t it?” her past self scoffed.
“Is Nightmare Night in poor taste?” she retorted.
“Good point,” the Trixie look-alike said. “And a point for you.”
What started my own loop? Starlight wondered.
By definition, the loop started itself. But in that case, was it simply a matter of fate for the loop to be there? Had the universe folded itself according to some unknown, greater principle?
Once again, she dismissed the notion. If there were principles like that, they ware beyond her ability to comprehend. More importantly, that kind of deterministic view would only lead her to existential dread.
She groped for some alternative. There could have been some kind of a primer, she thought. An instigating event.
Her mind turned back to Twilight’s case.
In some original timeline, Twilight could simply be living her life. Then, one of those many possible disasters would happen. Cerberus roaming the wilds, a dam ready to burst, or something equally as important. As a result, Twilight could have been stricken by grief and remorse for not preventing the disaster. She would seek out the time spell and go to the past to prevent the calamity by warning her younger self.
This was the point at which Twilight would have broken out of the deterministic model – and would cause a paradox. If the disaster was prevented, there was no reason for Twilight to actually go to the past – if she didn’t go to the past, the disaster would have happened.
And so on.
Before Starlight had learned of Twilight’s own adventure, she would have imagined this would create two split realities; a disastrous one, and a safe one. The disastrous one would lead to the creation of the safe one while continuing on. And the occupants of the safe one would be none the wiser.
But it seemed the universe was far more elegant.
By pulling Twilight back at just the right moment, it didn’t matter what the alicorn had been going to warn her younger self about – be it a dam bursting, or wasting a week on futile worries.
With the alternatives boiling down to equal action on Twilight’s side – delivering her past self half a warning – those alternative universes collapsed into a single possibility. There was no more need to have an offshoot universe for every option – a doomed world, a safe world, one with Twilight warning her younger self about a theoretical disaster, and so on.
Thus, the loop stabilized.
But what of the original timeline? What happened to the Twilight who broke the rules of causality and defied fate?
The only answer Starlight could think of chilled her to the bone. It was in the word itself – primer. To do its job, a primer would burn itself out. The original timeline became self-contradicting and was discarded. All it left behind was a remnant devoid of paradoxes.
A stable time loop. A scar on spacetime.
“Cadence!” Trixie’s voice broke Starlight’s silent pondering.
“Where?” Starlight looked around. Her past self pointed. “Oh yeah, and she’s talking to herself. Imagine that.”
The younger her snickered. “Oh, do you think one of them is the real one?”
Starlight smirked. “I feel like Cadence wouldn’t think of herself during the transformation.”
The other pony said something, but Starlight was already deep in her own thoughts again.
Maybe there still was a reality where the dam broke. The only thing she knew was that she wasn’t living in that one. Just like she wasn’t living in the reality outside of her own time loop.
And yet, she couldn’t help but wonder. What could have caused her own loop in the first place?
Just like with Twilight’s case, all Starlight could do was to hypothesize. Maybe there was a timeline in which she didn’t confess to Trixie. She gulped as she realized she’d spent the whole evening with another pony – while leaving Trixie to sulk in some corner, angry at the world.
And probably at Starlight.
Would that make Trixie leave Starlight’s life for good? And would Trixie leaving fill Starlight with enough regret to go to the past and try to right this wrong, starting this whole loop in the first place?
She wanted to say it wouldn’t. But she had kinda jumped to the past because she was angry.
She shuddered, imagining that other self. Doomed to replace her reality with a better one for somepony else and disappearing from existence as a result. Just in case there was such a pony, she sent them her wordless thanks.
Starlight sighed.
She was going to play this out, she decided. Even though she barely remembered what she’d said last time. So she was just going to do it by the seat of her pants. If that broke reality, she would probably never know.
And if Twilight sends me to Tartarus for this... Starlight bit her lip, but then snickered. Then maybe fate is real after all – and not very keen on my hubris.