During her walk around Ponyville, Flurry Heart and her royal guards saw 3 Shining Armors rush by. She took a paper and quill out of her black saddlebags and hastily wrote a letter with her telekinesis.
“Dear Aunty Twilight,
Your big brother... My father did something stupid again.Hypothetically speaking, what would you do if a reckless, powerful unicorn stallion created several Mirror
PondPool clones, and they were running around Ponyville? And what’s the best way to find out which is the original?Also, were there any ethical issues with the spell that you used to get rid of the extra Pinkie Pies?
P.S. Can you make it to Ponyville today?
P.P.S. I got my Cutie Mark today by doing something that other ponies would consider impossible!
P.P.P.S. Maneican Bell’s grand opening was more successful than I could have imagined. Filthy Rich and Fancy Pants are considering opening franchises in cities across Equestria!
Your favorite niece,
Flurry Heart”
She finished scribbling over her mistakes, rolled it up and sealed it shut, and sent off a letter in a burst of green flame and went back to the Maneican Bell opening party.
A scroll appeared in front of her twenty minutes later, and she unrolled it to read it.
Dear Flurry Heart,
You’re my only niece unless my B.B.B.F.F. and Cadance had another filly without telling me? So you’re technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.
You always have interesting hypothetical questions. You remind me of myself at your age.
I’d written up a flowchart for this situation years ago, but it’s enormous and parts of it are classified, so I’ll make this short. Hypothetically speaking, if the unicorn is powerful or likely to escape, the Mirror Pool clones should be dealt with by the nearest princess as quickly as possible before they escape, rebel, and/or create even more clones. If they aren’t likely to escape, then they should be locked up until I can decide what to do with them.
Fortunately, clones normally have few memories and are easily distracted, and in an emergency, a Princess can give the group a boring task such as watching a blank wall, and tell them that anypony that looks away or does anything other than stare at the wall will be sent back to the Mirror Pool.
The spell matrix diagram for banishing the clones is written on the back of this scroll if you’re curious about how it works.
███████████████████! █████████████████████████████████ Pinkie Pie!█████████████████████████ ███████████████████████████████ problems getting magical constructs to sound realistic instead of ████████████████████, ██████████████ ask Discord later. █████████████████, ████████████████ will create a permanent magic barrier that only a powerful unicorn or alicorn could break.The Mirror Pool was created by Discord thousands of years ago as a prank, and the clones are soulless magical constructs. In that situation, the Princess in charge just needs to accurately identify the clones and send them back to the Mirror Pool before they rebel or make more clones.
Lulu hasn’t been able to fix my worsening nightmares of quesadillas and I don’t want to be anywhere near one, but I’ll need to calm the buck down and find a better before my next trip to Ponyville.My schedule’s full and I’m dealing with an enormous friendship problem facing all of Equestria, so I definitely can’t be in Ponyville for the rest of week!
Anyways, happy birthday and congratulations on finally getting your cutie mark. Is your special talent related to weather or cyclones like I’d thought? If so, please, please visit sooner; I haven’t seen you in months! With the spell that Sky Piercer, Lulu and I are working on, we’ll have a permanent way to stop the windigos. Amazingly, the strength of the blizzards that windigos create is proportional to the total amount of fighting between the different kinds of ponies, not the amount per pony in an area. Equestria’s at a record population and still growing thanks to recent improvements to farming and medicine, but my calculations indicate that windigos won’t be a real problem for at least a few decades!
But what should I do if there’s never an alicorn with the special talent this spell needs? Should I try to keep the population stable once the windigos become a problem by changing incentives such as tax laws? Or should I convince different types of ponies to stop ██████████████ ███████████████, thinking about ████████████████████ ██████████? ███████████████████████, ██████████████████████████████████████! In the worst case, my best option would be to seal away all the pony magic in Equestria!Your Favorite Aunt,
Twilight Sparkle
P.S. The Royal Astronomers say that they picked up a burst of high frequency electromagnetic waves from the moon last night! Lulu thinks it’s just a measuring error or the Aurora Borealis. And she says hi!
P.P.S. I had wanted to test a hypothesis, but I couldn’t find the cursed accessories that you mentioned in your last hypothetical question at Zecora’s hut. The borrower filled out a checkout form when Zecora was out gathering herbs and paid the deposit fee plus the maximum late fee up front, but didn’t write down their identifying cutie mark. Trixie, Starlight, Sunset, and Luna denied having the artifacts.
Hypothetically speaking, the strengths of the curses of the necklaces and the Rebel Shades would reset if a pony takes them off. And wearing the emotion dampening “I Love Corn” choker with the Alicorn Amulet should reduce the latter’s induced rage and paranoia to mild annoyance or even indifference, even after months of uninterrupted use, but there might be indirect side effects of long term use that I didn’t consider.
P.P.P.S. Oops, I’m almost out of ink and the ambassador from Germaneigh looks pretty angry. I’m sorry this letter’s such a mess.
Flurry Heart finished reading the letter. She looked down at the red and bright yellow necklaces that she put on this morning. She considered her next steps, thinking ’I have to send the clones back to the Mirror Pool as quickly as possible, before this gets out of control.’
Princess Flurry Heart pointed out a large abandoned building, and ordered her guards to split up and search Ponyville and the Everfree by ground and air, and bring every Shining Armor back there by any means necessary. Twilight was counting on her to stop a clone rebellion.