//------------------------------// // 10. Black Magic Show // Story: Crisis on Two Equestrias // by RainbowDoubleDash //------------------------------// They’re gonna teleport! The pony realized just as Twilight and Twilight’s horns began to glow. She ignored the smoke at her hooves and reached out magically, using her full power in panic. “No you don’t!” She exclaimed, her own horn reaching out with magic just as the teleportation bubbles began to form around the four of them. She seized them and pulled as hard as she could. “You can’t escape that easily! I’m gonna kill you and – ” She had pulled too hard in her panic. While what had happened was much more complicated than simply accidentally throwing them over her shoulder, it just about amounted to that. She turned quickly, just in time to see the teleportation bubbles pop them out of existence, even as Trixie’s wagon hit the ground behind the pony and splintered into a thousand pieces. She had hurled them somewhere deep in the Everfree, she realized. The pony groaned and rolled her eyes. “Perfect,” she chastised herself, horn glowing as she spread a pair of wings that manifested on her back. She beat them a few times, heading into the air. --- An equine body in free-fall reaches a terminal velocity of about one hundred twenty miles per hour after roughly fifteen seconds of falling, Twilight thought in the brief instant where she was suspended in mid-air rather than falling. Rate of acceleration is roughly thirty-two feet per second squared in a vacuum. We’re falling a slower than that due to air resistance, though. There’s about ten seconds until we hit the ground. “Twiiiiliiiiiiiiight!” Lulamoon screamed right into her ear just as the two of them began to fall. Out of the corner of her eye, Twilight saw Sparkle and Trixie appear and also start plummeting. Nine seconds. One of us has to teleport all of us so we don’t get separated, she thought, even as Sparkle looked at her. Her eyes told Twilight that her counterpart had reached the same conclusion. Eight seconds. Speed is maintained by teleporting. So I have to teleport before reaching terminal velocity anyway or it won’t matter. Seven seconds. Sparkle reached out her hoof, and Twilight grabbed it as she looked around while Trixie and Lulamoon screamed. But this was the middle of winter. All the trees had lost all their leaves. The leaves might have served as something of a cushion, but without them the trees weren’t likely to make their landing any easier. Six seconds. “I see a lake!” Sparkle called, pointing. Five seconds. “But we’re going too fast! Water will be as hard as rock!” Four seconds. The water was probably freezing, anyway. If they hit it, or teleported straight into it, they’d go into shock. The ground was very, very close. Three seconds. They were close enough to terminal velocity now that it wouldn’t matter. Velocity… “I have an idea!” Twilight called, pulling Sparkle, and therefore Trixie, closer to her to make teleporting easier. Two seconds. Twilight closed her eyes and set her horn glowing. One second. Twilight swore that she felt the ground just slightly touch her for a fraction of a second even as they all teleported. Pop. For a moment, there was the blissful silence of the slight delay between disappearing and re-appearing…and then… Pop. Twilight opened her eyes, and let out a cry of delight as she saw that her plan had worked. The ground was moving away from them – they were now ascending into the sky. “What?” Trixie demanded, her screaming stopping. “Speed is maintained in a teleport,” Twilight explained, “but velocity doesn’t have to be! All I had to do was change our direction so that we were falling up!” “Brilliant!” Sparkle said, clapping her forehooves together as they continued to sail upwards, although without thrust behind them, they were slowing down notably. “I didn’t even think of that!” “Now you’re thinking with ‘porting!” Twilight said with a smile. “That’s what Princess Celestia told me the first time I showed her that! It was great, there was a fun little obstacle course that she had set up in the garden, and – ” “I had the same thing! Well obviously it wasn’t set up by the Princess, but – ” “Magic! Wonderful! We’re falling again!” Trixie exclaimed. “Huh? Oh, right hang on…” --- As the pony soared through the sky, she sensed her quarry teleporting twice. She froze in the sky, eyes wide at the thought of them leaving the Everfree, but according to that little crystal they’d created to track her – which she could use to do the reverse – they were still within the forest. She breathed out a sigh of relief. “That was close, though,” she thought aloud, pausing a few moments and considering. She smacked her hooves together and smiled brightly when a solution occurred to her, however. Her horn glowed deep blue, and she fired off a burst of magic towards the sky over the center of the Everfree. It reached its destination inside of a minute, then seemed to vanish. It hadn’t, however – it had simply changed its nature. To any being with magical sight, the skies over the Everfree would have seemed to begin to roil and twist, shuddering and shifting until they began to spin around and around like a hurricane, glowing with angry, dark magic. “Ha!” The pony exclaimed as she resumed her flight. “Try teleporting now!” The pony felt pretty good about herself for that trick. Still, sooner or later they were going to figure out that she could track them through the crystal, probably sooner. She needed some other way of finding them…and an amusing way to kill them, of course. It needed to be simultaneously, too. Well, maybe not, there was a chance that it wouldn’t make a difference. But fun or no, the pony didn’t want to leave her very existence, still only measured in hours, up to chance. She spotted a cave up ahead, and frowned. Something about it seemed familiar…she dug through the vague memories of Twilight and Trixie that she had. It wasn’t much, just flashes and small insights into their minds… And when a particular memory flashed through her mind, she laughed, and landed in front of the cave, magically stowing her wings as she skipped in, horn glowing brightly as she looked around. It didn’t take her long to find her target, sleeping soundly. “Hi there, kiddo! Is Mommy home?” --- Twilight and Sparkle landed easily on their hooves after the second teleport, while Trixie and Lulamoon tumbled off of them, both proceeding to kiss the ground furiously. Twilight was smiling for a few moments at their antics, and also at her own escape from certain doom by creative spell-use. She swiftly remembered, however, what had caused that certain doom. The purple, empty eyes of the pony that had attacked them flashed through her mind, and she fell back on her haunches. “I am all the bile and hatred and doubt that you four felt, put in a pony-shaped suit conjured up by the dying embers of the shattered Element, and given life and sentience! Without you, I wouldn’t exist!” “We made her,” Twilight said aloud, eyes wide. She looked to Sparkle, and Trixie and Lulamoon. “That pony…she said that we made her. That she was the Element of Magic.” “She’s lying,” Lulamoon said. “She has to be.” Twilight pointed at the magical device she had created to track the Element of Magic. “But…but you saw where that was pointing – hey!” Lulamoon had swiftly taken the gem from Trixie’s cape, throwing it to the ground and stomping a hoof down on it. It broke apart with a crunch and a burst of magic. “Five bits says that she found us by following this,” she said, telekinetically lifting the pieces of them stone she’d crushed and hurling them away. “Can probably follow it here.” “Lulamoon’s right,” Sparkle added, glancing at her counterpart. “We can’t take the chance.” Twilight looked down at her hooves. “She wasn’t lying,” she said. “I say she was,” Lulamoon insisted. “She wasn’t! You saw that the beam was pointing at her. And a special talent of anti-magic? And…and we made her!” Twilight was up now, beginning to pace back and forth. “The Element of Magic broke apart and it was because we were fighting over it and now everything that was bad about us has been made into her!” “That’s not poss – ” Lulamoon began, then paused, thinking. After a moment, she looked down, letting out a long sigh. “It is possible, actually…” “Huh?” Sparkle asked. “How? I know the Element of Magic is powerful, but I’ve never heard of any of the Elements actually making a pony before!” “I have,” Lulamoon said, glancing at the three of them. She bit her lip. “I…can’t go into the details, I promised Princess Luna. But, the Elements have created a pony before, in my world, at least. But she…she isn’t anything like that pony.” The four of them looked at each other uncomfortably. At length, Trixie stomped the forest floor with one hoof. “Well,” she said. “Trixie is officially homeless. Again. She’s getting hungry. And she in no way came here expecting to fight a pony-shaped abomination against magic. I wish to go back to Ponyville. Now.” “Not a bad idea,” Sparkle said. “I’m not even supposed to be here…I just want to go home…” “We can’t just run away!” Twilight objected, stepping forward and looking between the three ponies. “Princess Celestia and your Princess Luna,” she pointed at Lulamoon, “sent us into the Everfree to get the Element of Magic back!” Trixie looked at Twilight, eyes narrow. “Trixie was using the magic sight spell that her counterpart deigned to show her. It was active for the entire fight. That pony…she is like a hole in magic. She has no aura. When she cast spells it wasn’t that she was creating effects, it was more like she was ripping spell-shaped holes in the world, and magic would rush in to fill the gap.” Trixie shook her head. “Trixie learned from the Ursa Minor, Twilight, and from the Alicorn Amulet. She knows…I know my limits. I can’t fight her.” “But…” Lulamoon opened her mouth, beginning to object, before closing it, sighing. She looked to Sparkle and Trixie. “Twilight’s right,” she said, though she looked to Twilight. “But Trixie and Sparkle…they’re not here for this. We’re the ones who broke the Element, and they’re not apprentices of alicorns. They shouldn’t have come…and we can’t just draft them.” Twilight blinked a few times, surprised at the sudden shift in maturity from Lulamoon. She nodded after a moment. “Okay,” she said, trotting forward so that she was standing between the other three. “I’ll teleport us all back to the library. We can rest, do some research…then Lulamoon and I can come back here and deal with that pony.” The other three nodded, stepping closer to Twilight. She closed her eyes, thought of her library, and teleported. Pop. The brief delay between teleports was anything but quiet. A deafening roar reached Twilight’s ears as the four of them careened more than moved through space – Pop “Ahh!” Twilight cried out as they came tumbling down onto the ground. She rolled several feet, her movement stopped by a tree. Sparkle had been tossed into the air, and landed tangled in the branches of a pine tree. Lulamoon skidded past Twilight, almost keeping her footing before falling down, while Trixie… “Oof!” Twilight exhaled as Trixie skidded into her barrel, with enough force for Trixie to roll over Twilight and hit the tree that Twilight had hit as well. The next few moments were ones of scrambling and checking each other to make sure everypony was okay. Lulamoon stumbled back to the rest of them, Sparkle managed to get out of the tree with only a small amount of fuss and pain, and Trixie picked herself up off of Twilight. The three of them glared at her. Twilight shook her head. “What?” she demanded. “I wasn’t me!” “Maybe I should teleport us,” Sparkle volunteered. “Wait, hang on,” Lulamoon said, stopping the argument before it could begin. “Gimme a second, I got a feeling that…” her horn glowed blue, as did her eyes after a moment, and she looked up. Her eyes grew wide. “What?” Trixie asked, repeating the trick herself, albeit with somewhat more effort and a pink glow. “Oh…oh my…” “What is it?” Sparkle asked, looking up. The sky was slightly overcast, but looked otherwise normal, or as ‘normal’ as anything ever looked in the Everfree. “The sky is…spinning,” Lulamoon said. “Like water down a drain. And there’s this black lightning all over the place, and…” “It’s like the storms that form over the Southern Sea, south of Neigh Orleans,” Trixie said. “Hurricanes, we call them. The weather pegasi there, their main job is to prevent them from hitting land. It’s dangerous…” “What?” Twilight demanded, staring at the sky. She couldn’t see magic like Trixie or Lulamoon, but maybe…she closed her eyes, setting her horn glowing as she tried to sense the ambient magic of the area, as Sparkle did likewise. She discovered that Trixie and Lulamoon were right, there was a kind of drain in the sky, a roiling, twisting morass that seemed to be pulling at the ground beneath it. “Don’t know about hurricane…” Sparkle said after a moment, opening her eyes and glancing to the other three. “But it’s definitely like a whirlpool. Anypony trying to teleport inside the Everfree gets tossed and spun around, dropped anywhere…” her eyes widened at her own words, as she glanced around. “We could be anywhere inside the Everfree. We could be a hundred miles from Ponyville! More!” “How did that pony make this?” Lulamoon asked, shaking her head. “I don’t care that she was made from the Element of Magic, no unicorn is this powerful!” Twilight felt a panic attack coming on. It had been building for awhile, in fact, but hearing Lulamoon and, more poignantly, Sparkle, begin ones of their own, finally touched her off. “This isn’t possible!” she exclaimed, beginning to pace back and forth. “Ponies aren’t just made from nothing! The kind of power that she’s using, only the Princesses or Discord have it! And she shouldn’t be this…this evil! Now Princess Celestia is angry at me and she’s going to stop being my teacher – ” “You think you have it bad?” Lulamoon demanded, though there were tears in her eyes. She wiped them away, trying to fight them “I’m on thin ice with Luna as it is! I mean, yeah, she knighted me, but that was more for political reasons than anything! Luna would be crazy to not just strip me of my rank and ship me back to Neigh Orleans for this even if I fix everything…and I-I’ll never see my f-friends again…” “Trixie is homeless again!” Trixie wailed, doing little to hide her own tears. “All she wanted was to come back to Ponyville and apologize and put on a magic show! Rebuild her reputation! Now she has to get a wagon again and start over! Sh…she has no bits, and…and nothing but the cape on her back and hat on her head! Again!” she clutched her cape in her hooves, closing her eyes tightly. “I don’t want to go back to that rock farm. There’s no magic…no smiling…just rocks.” “At least you all get to go back to your family!” Sparkle exclaimed. She was on the ground, hooves over her head. “I…I screwed everything up! All I wanted was to learn more magic but I’ve spent all these months just running around and hiding and ruining ponies’ lives and I’m a fugitive and I’m gonna spend the rest of my life in jail and my parents aren’t going to want to see me…” Lulamoon looked to Sparkle. “What are you talking about?” she demanded. “Your dad’ll be overjoyed. He’ll probably declare the day you come back to be Twilight Day in Latigo.” “Don’t make fun of me!” “I’m not! I talked to your dad before the Grand Galloping Gala. He’s…he’s a…” she seemed to be searching desperately for the right words. At length, she sighed. “He’s a wreck. He’d give up everything just to see you for a minute or two. And he’d do anything to anypony else if he thought that it’d help, even threaten to…” she trailed off, then shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. Look, the point is that, yeah, you’re gonna go to jail…but your dad’ll see you every single day. Brother, too.” “A…and mom…?” Lulamoon shook her head. “Never met her. I don’t know.” Sparkle stared a long time at Lulamoon, who stared back. At length, she stood up straighter, horn glowing – an instinctive call for attention from other unicorns. Twilight and Trixie both glanced at her. “I want to go home,” Sparkle said. “I want to go home! A…and sitting around here and complaining and crying and worrying…that isn’t going to help! So we’re all going to pick a direction and start walking! And if we run into that pony, we’ll just buck her straight into the sun! Okay?” Twilight started at the sudden force behind her counterpart’s words. She wondered, idly, what exactly she had been up to for the past few months that seemed to have broken her so much, robbed her of so much of her self-esteem. Whatever it had been, she had clearly just decided to start getting over it. Twilight stood, and nodded. “O…okay,” she said. “I…I guess that you’re right. Princess Celestia might not ever forgive me…but she definitely won’t if all I do is sit around and do nothing!” “Princess Luna, too!” Lulamoon exclaimed. “I have to be the pony she thinks I can be, or else I’ll never get to keep my friends!” Trixie glanced between the three of them. “Trixie doesn’t have friends,” she said. “Trixie isn’t an alicorn’s student. Trixie is just homeless. Again. And all the speeches in the world aren’t going to change that!” Twilight trotted up to her. “You can stay with me,” she said. “Until you’re back on your hooves, anyway. No rock farm.” “Trixie doesn’t need help from anypony! She…” the showmare began, when she paused, and looked down at herself. She was still wringing her cape between her hooves. At length, she sighed. “O…okay. Trixie…Trixie sees your point. A-and…” she glanced at Twilight. “Thank-you.” Twilight nodded. She smiled at the three other ponies as Sparkle picked a direction and started walking, and the other three, having no better idea of where to go than she did, followed. “Who knows?” Twilight asked. “Maybe…maybe we can be friends at the end of this?” Sparkle scoffed. “I didn’t say anything about us having to like each other,” she said, though she frowned at the sight of Twilight looking dejected. “But…I guess we don’t have to hate each other.” --- Hundreds of miles away, atop the Canterhorn and within Canterlot Castle, Princess Luna finished explaining herself to the other Luna, the one native to this world. She wanted to see her reaction, but she found herself unable to do anything but stare at her own hooves as she spoke, wings held tightly at her side. “I see,” the native Luna said. “So you understand that the Princess, here, did not mean to offend you?” Celestia’s voice asked. Luna flinched. Celestia had been quiet as Luna has explained herself, and she had somehow almost forgotten her presence…she glanced up, and found Celestia standing next to Luna, looking down to her. She was standing close enough that their wings were just barely touching, looking down at her little sister with deep concern and worry and – – Love – Luna turned away, looking instead at the statue of Discord, somehow finding that a more agreeable sight. It hadn’t moved an inch, physically or magically. The spirit of chaos and disharmony remained as trapped now as he currently was in Luna’s world. She didn’t really see it, though. Even if she wasn’t looking at the pair, the image of the two of them was burned into her mind. For a just few, precious seconds, Luna had been able to convince herself that she had Celestia back. That her elder sister was sane and whole and never hadn’t been. That Luna hadn’t failed her so utterly… …but all it had been was a few seconds. Reality had come crashing back down, and the presence of this other Luna only served to reinforce its barriers. --- “So you understand that the Princess, here, did not meant to offend you?” Celestia asked Luna. Of course she didn’t, Luna thought, eyes narrow. But she did – nay, her very presence is offensive! Luna stood from where she had been sitting, glancing between Celestia and her otherworldly doppelgänger. She wouldn’t even look Luna in her eyes, instead focusing on the statue of Discord. “I insist that thou shalt not again attempt to usurp my rightful control over the domain of the Night,” she said. She knew she was slipping into early-modern Equestrian, but didn’t care. Her counterpart nodded, glancing a moment at her. “Of course,” she said. “If I had taken even a moment to investigate this world in detail, I would have seen that doing such was unnecessary. Your Celestia never fell as mine did.” She looked down, closing her eyes. “I…apologize.” Luna fought back a slight sneer – not at the apology itself, but rather, at Luna’s tone, which to her ears seemed full of condescension – in highlighting how she had never allowed loneliness and enviousness to consume her, as Luna had. “Yes, well,” she said, shifting her weight from one hoof to another. “Quite.” She looked to Celesita. “If thou wouldst excuse me, sister, I must now inform the castle of thy return, and see to assuaging the fears of the ponies – ” “Actually,” Celestia said, spreading her wings a little. There was a slight, and familiar, twinkle in her eye. “I would much prefer you stay, Luna. I have been trying desperately for hours now to get a decent cup of tea, and as you know, I do not like to take my tea alone.” Luna stiffened slightly. “B…but, the ponies – ” “The day progresses as it should,” Celestia interrupted, a slight smile on her face. “The night will come soon, and your Court begins then. It’s winter, Luna, and I don’t get to see as much of you as I would like as a result.” Luna’s eyes narrowed. “Tia, thy attempts to forge a bond of friendship between myself and my doppelgänger are as transparent as glass – ” “Excellent!” Celestia said, trotting past Luna. “You’ve caught on already, that’ll make things run much more smoothly. Wait here, I’ll go fetch the tea.” “Wh – bu – ” Luna began, turning and staring at her sister as she trotted from the gardens and towards the castle proper. “Tiiiaaaaaa!” “I’m certain you two will have a lot in common! I’ll be back in just a few minutes!” Luna bristled, wings flaring. No. Luna was not some little filly, Celestia couldn’t order her to stay in place. She was a diarch! Celestia’s equal in all things! She began trotting after Celestia, intent on leaving the garden and seeing to saving her reputation, when she heard her breath hitch in her throat – or a sound like that, anyway, though it came from a few feet behind her. Oh no, Luna thought, knowing where this was going to go even as she turned around to look at her counterpart. The other Princess Luna was sitting still, eyes downcast, but with one hoof to her mouth. Luna couldn’t see her face clearly, but she imagined that there were tears there. Luna stared after Celestia’s retreating form, then back to her counterpart, then back again. She scowled, stomped her hoof, and then turned back around, trotting over to the other Luna. It did not escape her that this Luna seemed to be somewhat taller, though only by a few inches. The result of a thousand years of freedom? Or was she just simply taller? “Wherefore – why are you crying?” Luna asked, forcing herself to use modern Equestrian. The other Luna took in a deep breath, then let it out with a shudder before looking up at her counterpart. “I – I’m not,” she insisted. “It’s just that I…I was remembering how insufferable Celestia could be sometimes, and how annoyed it made me. I’d forgotten.” She smiled softly. “So…so sure. So convinced that she knew how to fix everypony’s problems…o-of course, that was the problem…” she looked back down, her eyes distant. Luna scowled slightly. “You should not have come here,” she said without thinking. She immediately scrambled to cover her tracks. “H-here, as in the Castle, that is. I suspect that it brings up bad memories for you.” The other Luna closed her eyes, shaking her head. “Memories, yes…not bad ones, though. That’s what makes them hurt.” Luna’s scowl deepened at that. Did her counterpart have to so show such maturity even in the face of her own pain? Luna knew full well that were situations reversed, she doubted she could keep as level a head as her counterpart was. And the fact that she was annoyed by this only served to annoy her more. She closed her own eyes, forcing herself to take a few calming breaths. After that, she did her best to not think of the other Luna at all. She seemed lost in her own thoughts, and there, Luna determined, she could stay for the moment, while she tried to parse through her own feelings on the matter. Certainly it wasn’t jealousy plaguing her. No. Not at all. Not even a little. “Tea-time!” Luna let out her breath slowly, opening one eye. Celestia bore a fine mahogany tray, set with ceramic, ornate cups imported from the far-distant Qilin Empire – this was a tea set broken out only when foreign dignitaries visited Equestria. Several servants followed Celestia with trays set with biscuits and pastries, as well. If any of them seemed confused at the sight of two Lunas, none of them showed it, though it was possible that Celestia had told them what to expect. Luna looked at Celestia, eyebrow raised slightly. “That…was very fast, Tia,” she noted. She had expected Celestia to disappear for an hour, at least, but her own internal sense of time told her it had been no more than fifteen minutes. Celestia smiled to her sister, even as she nodded to one of the servants who had followed her out. “Feather Duster has informed me that as I have taken the day off, I am not allowed inside the castle, lest I accidentally run into some official or another and they pester me. She was very insistent.” The pegasus maid smiled slightly even as she lay out a blanket and set down the trays of food, and helped Celestia with the tea set. “Now, if there is anything you need, Majesty…?” “No, thank-you, Miss Duster. I’ll call for you if something should come up.” The servants all bowed and left, as Celestia poured out cups of tea for the three of them. Luna’s counterpart glanced between the statue of Discord, and the tea set, even as Celestia poured out cups for the two Lunas, and one for herself. “We’re going to take tea in front of the spirit of disharmony,” she noted. Celestia nodded. “We will be in an excellent position to react should Discord break free, but until then, he is only a statue like any other. Or at least, that is how I choose to see it.” She took a sip of tea, and Celestia, already a generally optimistic soul, visibly brightened further, her wings raising just slightly, her posture becoming a little better, and her smile becoming a little more honest. Suddenly, all is right with the world, Luna thought of her sister. Every problem, soluble. Every difficulty, surmountable. There is tea, and tea is the solution to all problems. Or rather, it has the amazing ability to replace all problems with a more fundamental one, viz. why isn’t there any more tea? Luna glanced at her counterpart, who was staring into her own cup of tea, the same distant – deliberately distant – look on her face. The local – and rightful – Princess of the Night looked away quickly, and scowled into her tea, taking a long drink and ignoring how it tried to burn her tongue. Her own problems, on the other hoof, would require quite a bit more than tea to solve.