Friendship was magic.
Not all human magic was friendship, but the old Equestrian homily still held true even in this brave new world. So did all of the verifiable phenomena it implied, like sympathetic bonds. Sunset usually chose not to perceive the vast web of social relationships that crisscrossed Canterlot High; doing so would make it hard to see anything else. But focusing solely on the connections to a specific person drew her to her quarry as inevitably as gravity.
Even if that quarry turned out to treat gravity as optional. "Ditzy. Somehow I'm not surprised."
"Nice to see you too," Ditzy Doo said with a lopsided smile. "What did I break this time?"
Sunset raised an eyebrow. "Why would you think you broke something?"
That got a shrug and a sad "Pattern recognition."
"You haven't done anything wrong." And, because Sunset also had good pattern recognition, she added, "Not as far as I can tell, anyway. But someone you're close to has gotten my attention, and I was hoping you could tell me about him." A minor exertion of will manifested a sheet of paper with Thought Bubble's face on it, captured from Sunset's own memory.
One glance at the picture and Ditzy was so surprised, she was almost seeing straight. "My cousin broke reality? That'd be a first for him."
"No one broke re..." Sunset trailed off as she considered what other extensions of herself had been up to this week. "No one you know broke reality. Recently. But I've been trying to get answers to some deep cosmic questions and he came up. What can you tell me about him?"
"He's a nice guy, but nobody special in the grand scheme of things," Ditzy said with a shrug. "The most cosmically significant thing he ever did was teach me how to play Hocus Pocus: the Get-Together. Which, you know, introduced me to the idea of multiverses." She tapped her seven-bubble tie clip.
"Huh. So not some transcendent being in mortal guise or anything?"
Ditzy snorted at that. "He writes fan fiction, Sunset. If he's a transcendent being, I'm an eldritch horror."
Sunset gave her a flat look. "You're a six-dimensional entity who wanders from universe to universe as a congery of iridescent spheres."
Ditzy rolled her eyes, which admittedly would've been quite the experience for someone who didn't have the constitution for mathematics. "Anyone can sound eldritch if you hit a thesaurus that hard. You know what I mean."
"At this point?" Sunset scowled at the externalized memory. "I'm not sure I do."
After a suitably dramatic pause, Ditzy cleared her throat. "Have you considered, you know, talking to him about it?"
"Now that you've confirmed that he isn't a bigger fish slumming it in our universe, I may do just that."