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// Twilight's life as an assistant 1: Towards Conflux 
// Story: The Many Lives Of Twilight Sparkle 
// by Shitbewackyo 
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Being a stowaway wasn’t easy, as Twilight very soon discovered. The lack of seats and the rough metal floor made it unpleasant to sit or lie down, and the lack of windows led to long stretches of utter boredom where all she could do was stare at the sky above and revisit thoughts she already had a hundred times before. To make matters worse she had to endure the alien yet familiar feeling of her love reserves burning away, a constant reminder that she wasn’t a pony anymore.  At the very least she could make do with the fact that she still had her magic and didn’t need to do her business in a corner.

Then there was the matter of the book. At one point Twilight almost wanted to burn it, even if she knew that the book was blameless. She had planned incessantly in the Everfree about what she would do and how to make sure that absolutely NOPONY would know anything was amiss. And what did she do just before leaving? Not only did she decide to take a book, but one that the fake Twilight might actually search for! Twilight knew she would go mad looking for it, analyzing every nook and cranny of the library trying to find something that she knew should be there. And if she would do it then so would the fake Twilight. That was why the book remained alone, untouched, in a clean but distant corner of the gray carriage and why Twilight was left bored to death for most of the trip. 

The only reprieve from the boredom Twilight got were the hourly checkups. With the remote-eye spell, she took quick snapshots of the outside, using them to gauge the train’s progress and any upcoming stops. It was the only entertainment Twilight allowed herself, and even then, each time she cast the spell she felt as if that was the time she’d be caught. But the necessity of not remaining blind to her surroundings and the logical side of her mind reassuring her that nopony would see her so far away from everything kept her motivated to use it again and again.

Her fear would spike whenever she saw a train station approaching, so much so that the first few times the train came to a stop she wasted her energy casting invisibility spells to fool any inspectors or loaders. Nopony ever came, but Twilight’s fear of getting caught whenever the train stopped never truly went away, and she never slept without setting up a magical alarm. The closest she ever came to seeing sompony was when she heard the muted sounds of two ponies chatting to each other next to her carriage when the train stopped to refuel and to restock its food and water.

Twilight’s nights became another reminder of how much had changed after she didn’t feel the soft touch of Luna’s magic even once. It wasn’t uncommon for Luna’s wake not to reach everypony in one night, and other races felt it much less than a pony. Yet not once since she had become a changeling had she felt the calming aura of her presence, and despite only recently having gotten used to it, having it taken away made her feel cold nonetheless. She still dreamed, and she thanked Celestia for that, but her dreams were much more chaotic and nonsensical. It was as if Luna hadn’t returned at all.

Twilight’s slow routine, peppered with anxiety, continued for two days as the train curved around the northern edges of the Everfree and turned southwards, where the grass grew several shades more yellow and the winds picked up.

Twilight’s half-resolve half-resentment to not read the book she brought along almost broke on the third day, as her unending boredom forced her to realize how childish she was being and that reading the book or not wouldn’t change anything. However, her knowledge of the train’s timetable prevented her from enjoying the last part of her trip. After all, she would soon be in Conflux and she needed to focus.

The first signs of Conflux didn’t come until the early morning of the next day, however, when Twilight caught a sign in one of her checkups that had increased in frequency since she woke up.

“Welcome to Conflux County” 
Upon reading it Twilight let out a breath that she felt like she’d been holding in since Ponyville. She was almost there. In the back of her mind, she started preparing a teleport as she kept scouting the outside.

Twilight had to be more careful this close to a city. She had to hide her spell from other trains and anypony in the buildings overlooking the tracks. She could only briefly scan the rapidly urbanizing landscape as the train entered the greater limits of Conflux, where vineyards and fruit orchards overtook the vast plains of middle Equestria. 

Twilight’s body protested as her horn braced itself to teleport, breaking her concentration. It wanted her to rest, to not spend more time exhausting herself walking to the city. It saw how distant the spires of Conflux still were and could already feel the aches from walking the distance, of how much energy she would waste. Her hunger too chimed in, insisting that she wait and find somepony to siphon for love.

But her mind proved too strong for the cravings of her new body. Remaining in the cart and disembarking close to the central train station would attract much more attention than it would be worth, especially in a city that lived and prided itself on transportation. She had to be discreet and avoid a repeat of the library. She could not be caught. 

Her instincts faded into a distant buzz as Twilight regained her concentration and braced herself again, levitating up the Daring Do book and holding it close to her chest. She cast the remote-eye spell once more but this time didn’t dismiss it right afterward.

‘Okay, steady now.’ The houses whizzed past outside, without any place to discreetly teleport into. ‘Remember, don’t trust your feelings, trust the process.’ Twilight saw a rapidly approaching dirt hill through the spell, separating a row of buildings from the railway.

The spell went off and Twilight momentarily felt a connection to the outside, to a place at the bottom of the dirt hill that was far enough away from the tracks. Then her body went numb and she fell out of reality.

Without flinching, Twilight started going through a mental checklist. She made sure not to look at her surroundings. She sent out a slew of tethers all around her, missing with each one. The next volley shared the same fate. Again and again, she fired them off as she floated and fell and twisted and made absolutely sure not to look and try to understand. 

After the twenty-fifth volley, one of Twilight’s tethers pierced something, and the first actual feeling that she had received in what seemed like forever bloomed through the magical cord. She solidified the tether and pulled, repeating the process as her body went up and down simultaneously even as she neared the point her tether had attached itself to.

Her transition back to real space came nauseatingly quick, and then it was as if she had always been there, lying on the dirt. The memory of her time in the aether rapidly becoming a distant, faded memory, as if she had dreamt of the whole thing.

Twilight couldn’t help but shoot a self-content smile as she stood up, not even needing to regain her balance. 

“Not bad, not bad at all.” She said. Unlike a usual teleport where the tether between the two rifts was established before entering the aether, the variation she’d used let a pony tether to the exit in the aether itself. It was dangerous and took more time, but it also let the caster completely ignore the relative movement of them and their destination. And Twilight had performed it perfectly, again. 

“Wait, I can’t forget!” Twilight suddenly remembered the most common complaint she had with the spell, but like usual it came to her far too late.

“Okay-okay, white void, no, grey, no that’s not right either. Maybe a blue?” She muttered. “Come on Twilight!” But the harder she thought about the aether the more it slipped from her until she was left with nothing of her memories in the aether, again. A pony’s brain was not good at remembering the aether, and it seemed that it wasn’t any different for a Changeling. 

Twilight sighed, it wasn’t surprising, but she had always held a faint hope of one day being able to recall something substantial. However, even after several experiments, all she had were notebooks filled with incoherent scribbles. Not that anypony had managed much else, but that didn’t make it any better for her.

“I guess it doesn’t matter right now.” Twilight said, and despite a repeat failure, she didn’t remain disappointed for long. In the distance, the train was growing smaller and smaller as it disappeared behind a turn, and it took the noise that had accompanied Twilight for days with it. She was left alone, with nothing but the sound of distant activity. She was now in Conflux, she had made it.

She scrambled over the dirt hill and for the first time in her life got a view of Conflux, the inner Vanhoover. 

While many of Equestria's larger cities bore obvious marks of expansion, none so were as overt as Conflux. Being one of the fastest-growing cities in Equestria left it without any sort of established core for the city to grow around. Instead, the yellow-beige buildings made out a vast sprawl far below Twilight, across the three banks of the two rivers that met and merged into the “Confluence”. The sprawls grew intermittently denser and petered out, but never devolved into an overstuffed shantytown. The lack of a core, however, was being aggressively rectified by the still ongoing construction of the two aerodromes.

The gargantuan buildings, shaped like the stumps of titanic trees, rose from the river’s banks to touch the sky, dwarfing the city even as the buildings surrounding the Aerodromes tried their best to catch up to their neighbor in height. 

Only one of the Aerodromes was approaching completion, the building finished yet one side devoid of the marble coating, statues, and ornamentation of the other side. The second Aerodrome was still having its wall constructed, leaving a good chunk of the insides bare for all to see. But their incompleteness didn’t mean that they weren’t used, quite the contrary.

Thanks to the missing wall Twilight could, even from her spot kilometers away from the Aerodrome, see the hive of activity that filled the insides. Hundreds of airships and dirigibles arrived and departed, creating faint trails in the sky which left and came into the city from all cardinal directions, merging with the larger ones from the more finished Aerodrome. 

It wasn’t Canterlot, but to Twilight, who had lived in Ponyville for what felt like decades, it was still somewhat of a shock, especially since unlike Canterlot one could see the entire extent of the city at once. 

‘No wonder ponies compare this to Vanhoover.’ Twilight thought, now suddenly finding it funny how the quiet housing surrounding her was part of the same busy hive that was Conflux. Taking on a more serious expression Twilight analyzed the city. It was just as the books had described it: large, unestablished, frequented by travelers, and very busy. It was perfect.

Realizing she had something brown in her vision, Twilight was startled to see black hair mottled with brown patches of mud, but she quickly calmed down, realizing it was just her own body.

‘How do changelings ever get used to switching bodies so often?’ Twilight wondered, and as she looked over her body again she noticed how dirty she had become from her landing, and the Daring Do book had shared a similar fate. 

‘Okay, maybe my execution of the spell wasn’t quite perfect.’ Twilight thought as the glow she’d been enjoying since her success disappeared. ‘Next time I’ll get the landing right.’ 

Twilight saw nopony on the road beyond the buildings. Even so, she ducked behind the hill, eager to test a theory she had toyed with on the train. Two green flames ran down the length of her body, a patch of black chitin between them that was soon replaced by fur. After the flame was done a clean pony remained, all the dirt and mud having fallen to the ground. 

“Yes! It works.” Twilight marveled at how quickly she had become clean. ‘Definitely something to remember for later.’

A simple cleaning spell went down the cover of Twilight’s book, and it was as if it had never been dirtied in the first place.

Now that she and her sole possession were in a presentable state, Twilight finally crested the dirt hill and set off towards Conflux proper. It was time to find a job.