Time and Time Again

by Kawa

Disassembly

Chapter 1 - Disassembly

“Well now,” the young, cream-white colt said to himself as he adjusted his spectacles. “Father got me access to this wing of the castle; it would be a terrible thing to squander it.”

Pyrrhic Victory cracked his neck as he entered the Starswirl Wing, intent on finding an interesting spell and making it better in any way he could. He was a young unicorn with red hair, a telltale shine in said hair betraying his proud heritage. He was an enterprising scientist with a vision, and his father, proud member of the Lunar Guards and reason for his oddly inappropriate name, had pulled many strings to get him into this virtual sanctum of magical history.

It was quite some time since the Elements of Harmony had their last noteworthy adventure, and two of their grandchildren planned to make - or break - history.

It didn’t take Vic, as he preferred to be called, long to find a scroll case that caught his fancy - though actually most of them did - and knowing he could not bring it or any other scroll with him, he opted to commit the entire thing to memory. He read the scroll several times over as his dad stood and watched, resplendent in his armor.

Vic wasn’t allowed to take any scroll with him, and he had forgotten to bring a pen and paper of his own to copy the information, so he had cleared his mind of all irrelevance and focused on the contents of the scroll he had chosen. It was a trick he had learned some years prior, and though it was difficult and prone to failure, it had served him well. It wasn’t even a magical trick, but rather a purely mental exercise. It was also one of the few such tricks Vic knew.

What seemed like hours later, with arcane knowledge swirling in his mind, Vic finally put the scroll back in its casing and placed it where he had found it. Even with a massive strain on his concentration, it wouldn’t do to leave a mess. What would his grandmother even think? Still, Vic had never gotten home so fast before. Even if he knew how to teleport, he wouldn’t have dared to do so, afraid it would break his already strenuous concentration and mess up his memorization of the writings he had learned.

“Jennie dear, I need at least five sheets of paper and a fresh pen, STAT”, Vic announced as he ran into his house and skidded a few centimeters on the rug. His live-in marefriend Jennie took one look at Vic’s glazed-over eyes, nodded in understanding, brushed some of her hair from her face, and provided the requested items with well-practiced timing, just when Vic sat down at his desk.

Now, the thing to know about Jennie was not that she was like a somewhat calmer copy of her grandmother, but that she possessed a very rare artifact. Having not inherited her grandmother’s strange abilities (or at least not the interesting ones), she made do very well with her enchanted saddlebags. They could hold an undetermined volume of objects, and whenever she reached in to retrieve something, it was always right there on top of the heap. This was, of course, because her saddlebags were actually an implementation of Hayward’s Handy Haversack, and considering she was given the saddlebags by Queen Celestia herself (in a completely unrelated story concerning depression), Jennie was rightfully proud to carry such a treasure.

In practice, she mostly used it to provide her special somepony with the tools he required. But only from the one side; the bag on the other side was much more whimsical in content. The day she accidentally wore her saddlebags the wrong way around was a good day indeed.

Shortly after Jennie finished reminiscing about her treasure, Vic audibly blinked his eyes and called Jennie over.

“So whatcha copy?” Jennie asked as she wiped some sweat from her coltfriend’s brow.

“This, dear Jennie, is the time-travelling spell that Star Swirl the Bearded came up with way back when”, Vic obligingly replied. “You might remember Grandmother Sparkle telling the story of how she used it to tell herself one week past that she did not need to worry?”

“Oh yeah, that’s right. This is the same spell, then?”

“The very same. And I intend to study it and make it better”, Vic proudly declared.

“What’s wrong with it now?”

“If I remember Grandmother Sparkle’s story and copied the scroll correctly, it is not only somewhat limited in range, but also only allows you to travel to a given destination only once”, Vic explained with a frown. “I am uncertain how to interpret the latter, but I feel the former encourages improvement.”

Jennie nodded in vague understanding. She was no scientist, but she was nonetheless well practiced in understanding Vic’s sometimes-odd statements.

“Okay then. What’ll you do first?” Jennie asked. She knew it was a rhetorical question – Vic had optimized a spell or two before, but maybe he’d surprise her.

“I plan to reduce the spell to its component steps, find out which steps contribute the least, and basically go from there.”

Jennie sighed at the answer. It was indeed the same thing Vic had done before and Jennie felt almost let down. Still, she produced some more paper for her favorite unicorn to work with.

One week later, Vic ran into Jennie’s bedroom, nearly tearing the door from its hinges.

“I have it!” he exclaimed as he jumped onto Jennie’s bed, holding a single sheet of paper in his horn’s kinetic grip.

“Celestia’s rump, Vic! I could’ve been-”

“Frankly my dear, I find myself distinctly incapable of caring about what sort of carnal mischief you might be up to behind closed doors”, Vic interrupted with a half-crazy grin on his face that would make a certain mare he fondly referred to as “grandmother” (even though she totally wasn’t) run for cover, and a words-per-second ratio that would make a certain other one proud.

But then again, he tended to refer to all of the Elements of Harmony as “grandmother”.

“…it was locked”, Jennie remarked with a grin of her own, looking past her partner to one fiercely broken bedroom door lock.

“I know.”