My return to consciousness was the exact opposite of my descent from it. My mind rose slowly, drifting through scenes and memories, some of which were my own, some of which were not, yet still felt familiar. As my mind became more awake, I became more conscious of my surroundings, and of voices speaking nearby.
“Hurry up! We’ve got to go! They’ll be here any second.”
“I have to find it! It’s the whole reason we came here in the first place. We can’t leave until- Here! I found it! The watch! Let’s go!”
I opened my eyes slowly. I saw a blurry pink field in front of my eyes. Consciousness was rapidly returning to me, and I realized that I was draped over Kate’s back. We were moving rapidly. I slowly sat up, and shook my head to remove the fogginess from it. I saw David and Shane right in front of us, running towards an alleyway on the side of the street we were on. David’s teeth were clamped around a silver pocket watch, which glinted in the moonlight.
I looked behind us to see the wreckage of the pawn shop lying at the end of the street. The damage wasn’t too bad, but the entire front wall of the second floor was now littered over the road. I could hear sirens in the distance, rapidly coming closer. Someone must have called the police.
We made it to the relative safety of the alleyway and donned our cloaks once more. David stowed the watch in his saddlebag. “All right,” he said, turning to us. “We need to decide where we’re going to go next. I suggest we think fast, because those police are definitely going to be on the look out for whatever trashed that shop. He looked over at me and let out a sigh of relief when he noticed I was awake. “Peter, you’re okay,” he said. “You had us worried there for a bit. You were out for a good five minutes after you changed back.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I saw some crazy things while I was out. I’ll tell you about them in a bit. But first, I think I know where we need to go. Or I have a clue at least.” I looked around at the three of them. “Have any of you ever heard of the Journal of the Timekeeper?”
Shane and Kate looked puzzled, but David’s eyes widened. “How do you know that name?” he asked quietly.
“I’ll explain later,” I said, looking at him intently. “Right now, I need to know where it is. We need to find it.”
David nodded. “It’s at the town museum,” he said. “About a good two hours away from here. Let’s go. I’ll lead the way.” We galloped off down the alleyway, me still perched atop Kate’s back.
“Okay,” said Shane. “Can someone please explain to me what this journal is and what it has to do with anything?”
David started to speak, his head still turned straight ahead, not looking at us. “When I was born, my parents brought me home from the hospital, and noticed when they got home, there was a saddlebag sitting on their table. There was no note, or message or anything with it. The only things inside it were this pocket watch and a book, called the Journal of the Timekeeper. My parents agreed that they’d let me decide what to do with the items. They didn’t care too much about them. Both the watch and the journal were locked, and we could never get them open. I was about ten or so when they told me. I gave the book to a museum, but I kept the watch. Up until about a few weeks ago, that is.”
David turned to look at me. “Now,” he said. “The real question to ask, is how you know about that journal in the first place.”
I took a deep breath. “It’s a very long and insane story.” I spotted a nearby park, shaded from the view of the street by many trees. “Let’s go talk over there,” I said. Once everyone had taken a seat on the grass, I began to tell them about the memory I had seen. I told them about Spike’s discovery, the meeting with the Doctor, the failed rescue attempt and subsequent defeat. As I came to the end of my story, I looked around. Kate had tears running down her face. Shane looked extremely confused. David, meanwhile, looked as though the explanation to gravity had fallen right into his lap.
“Can someone please explain to me what this all means?” asked Shane.
“What does it mean?” cried David. “It’s the answer! The explanation! This explains everything that’s happened to us!”
“What are you talking about?” asked Shane.
“We had it all wrong from the start,” said David. He got to his hooves and started pacing back and forth, his brain obviously working at lightspeed. “We assumed that we were turning into ponies, or that the ponies we looked like had gotten trapped in our bodies somehow, but we were wrong. We didn’t turn into ponies, we turned back into ponies. We actually are the characters from the show.”
“That’s impossible!” exclaimed Shane.
“No it’s not,” said David.
“Yes it is,” said Shane firmly. “I remember living here, I remember growing up in Oregon, not Canterlot. I live here, not in some magical land of Equestria.”
David snorted in frustration. “That’s a part of it too,” he said. “You are Shining Armor and you aren’t. Well, you’re both at the same time, actually.”
“That doesn’t make any sense!” cried Shane.
“It really has to do with what you consider to be the definition of identity,” said David. ”After all, what is a man?”
I opened my mouth quickly. David turned to me. “If you say ‘a miserable little pile of secrets’, I swear I will hit you.” I shut my mouth again.
“Let me rephrase that,” said David. “What makes a person themselves? Their thoughts, memories and emotions,” he continued, not waiting for a response. He looked at Shane. “You were born in Equestria. That is your place of birth. But, when Discord cursed us and sent us here, he wiped out all your thoughts and memories, essentially everything that made you you. For all intents and purposes, you became a different person, because you thought and felt differently. So, in a sense, you are no longer Shining Armor, but you once were.”
Shane took a deep breath, trying to remain calm. “Then tell me,” he said slowly. “Why are there two people in my head instead of just one?”
David snorted. “Well what else did you expect your brain to do?” he asked. “All of a sudden, one day, after it’s already had to deal with the traumatizing process of turning into a pony, Cadance’s spell activates and it finds that suddenly a good quarter-century of completely new memories it has to deal with. And all of them are of you being an entirely different creature in a world totally different from your own. Your brain flipped out. In all honesty, you’re lucky it didn’t snap entirely. It couldn’t handle all of this new and confusing stuff, so it decided to create an entirely new personality based around those memories in order to pretend it happened to someone else. It’s a well-known defense mechanism actually.”
“Talk about your splitting headaches,” I said. We all chuckled.
“So you’re saying that the Shining Armor personality that’s living in my head is just a figment of my imagination?” Shane asked.
“Exactly,” confirmed David. He turned to Kate. “You’ve been really quiet this whole time,” he said. “What do you think about all of this?”
Kate took a deep breath. Her face had dried, but I could still see the tear streaks that had run down it earlier. “I don’t know,” she said. “It all seems a little too hard to believe. Maybe that’s just because I don’t have any of these memories yet. But, looking back at everything that’s happened to us lately, is it really so hard to believe that we could have been these ponies all along?”
“So where does that leave us?” I asked, wanting to get this conversation back to a more productive place. “What do we do now that we know the truth? Will these personalities just leave on their own? And why haven’t Kate’s memories returned yet?”
David paused, considering my questions. “Well,” he said. “I don’t know what will happen to the alternate personalities. Usually you have to go through therapy to get rid of them, but that’s mainly because they’re caused by some traumatic experience, not by a person remembering their former life as a result of some magic spell. If I had to guess, I’d probably say that they’ll eventually merge with the rest of us once our minds come to grips with the fact that this is who we really are. As for Kate’s memories, well, they do have about 25 years worth of replacement life to fight against. My guess is that a traumatic event will bring them out, like you and Shane had. The longer it gets, the more likely it is to happen.”
“Is there anything we can do to help our minds along?” I asked. Having another presence sleeping in a new corner of my mind was more than a little unnerving.
David thought about it. “Just become acquainted with your new memories,” he said. “It might also help if we referred to each other by our real names.”
“What, you mean like Spike?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said David.
“Alright, what about you then, Doctor?” I teased.
David shook his head. “I don’t think it works like that,” he said. “I don’t have any memories yet. They’re all in the watch.” He tapped his saddlebag. “Besides, I think it’s going to take a little bit more than calling me the Doctor to help me acclimate to about 1200 years worth of memories.”
He looked more than a little troubled by that statement, but I tried to help him shrug it off. “We’ll worry about it when the time comes,” I said, and he agreed. “What about you, Kate?” I asked. “Is it okay if we call you Cadance?”
She bit her lip and looked away from us. “Not... not right now,” she said. “I don’t like pretending to be someone I’m not.” She spoke again as David moved to say something. “I know that there is a possibility that I am the real Cadance, but I don’t have any of her memories and it’s still too confusing to try and come to grips with it.”
She looked at David. ”But what’s going to happen now that I know what my brain’s planning on doing?” she asked. “I already know that any personality my brain comes up with is going to be a coping mechanism, so will it still try and do things that way? Or will it try and pull some other coping mechanism?”
David shook his head. “It shouldn’t. The subconscious is a very stubborn thing. Just because you’ve been alerted to the fact that this alternate personality is real doesn’t mean your subconscious has. Even when you convince someone with a second personality that the second personality exists, the personality still hangs around. The subconscious has to come to grips with what’s happening, and that can take a lot longer. In fact, you should recover sooner, because you’ll be prepared for it. The only reason we’d recover naturally at all is because the trauma is magical and these memories are what we really are.” Kate nodded.
“What about you, Shane? Should we start calling you by your real name?” I asked.
Shane snorted. “You’ve been calling me by my real name this whole time,” he said “It’s Shane.”
David sighed. “Look, we’ll call you whatever you want us to call you, we’re not going to purposefully make you uncomfortable. But this whole thing will go a lot easier, and save you a whole lot of trouble if you just accept that this is who you are.”
“You can call me whatever you want to,” said Shane. “I really don’t care. I just find it hard to believe that I’m a pony from another dimension who was cursed to live on Earth, that’s all.”
David and I looked at each other. There really wasn’t much we could say to that. Shane looked at us and sighed. “Go ahead with your name plan or whatever,” he said. “Just don’t expect me to accept this theory without some concrete evidence or proof, okay?”
“Alright Sha- I mean, Shining,” I said, abbreviating his name. If I was calling him something different now, it may as well be as easy as I could make it. We all got up, preparing to leave.
“Hey, isn’t that your necklace?” Shining asked Kate, pointing with his hoof over at a silver glint in the grass.
Kate looked at it in surprise. “You’re right, it is. It must have fallen out of my saddlebag when we sat down.”
“Here,” said Shining. “I’ll get it.” He levitated it up and into Kate’s bag. Having searched the area for any more dropped items, we made our way again towards the museum. I was on Shining’s back, and we were bringing up the rear.
We traveled on in stony silence. I thought about Shining’s objections at the park and decided to get to the bottom of them. “So, what’s up with the whole reluctance to believe our theory? “ I asked him.
Shining Armor snorted. “You mean, besides the fact that it’s completely crazy?” he said.
“Yes, besides that.” I replied, not fazed.
Shining snorted again, this time in deep frustration. “Personally, I don’t see how you can be so quick to accept it. I thought I was being the reasonable one! Why are you all so quick to believe that you all were ponies and that this is your destiny? Are you just that obsessed with the show?”
“It’s not that,” I replied. “It’s the fact that everything about this fits perfectly. Especially the memories. I can feel them. They feel right, as if they always were a part of me. I really do feel like there legitimately are people in Equestria who are relying on me, who want to see me again.”
“Well, in case you’ve forgotten, you have a family here that wants to see you again too. So do I. So do all of us, in fact. Are we just supposed to say ‘Sorry Mom and Dad who’ve spent over twenty years loving and caring for me, now that I’ve turned back into a magical pony, I have to get back to my real family and leave you guys forever’?”
I sat back, silent. I hadn’t really considered that thought. Despite our origins in Equestria, we still had a family here and they still had a right to see us, to know of our fates. We supposedly belonged to Equestria, but we belonged to this world also. How were we supposed to stay in both?
“I don’t have an answer for you,” I told him.
“I didn’t think you would,” he replied sardonically.
“But that still doesn’t explain why you’re so reluctant to accept the name idea,” I continued. “Just because you have a new name doesn’t mean you have to live in Equestria. It really is just to help with mental health.”
“That’s the worst part!” replied Shining. “I can feel that it works, feel that it helps. Every minute, these new memories feel less and less new, more and more familiar. I can feel it changing things about me, the way I feel and think, and I don’t want them changed! I feel like I need to make all the decisions I can now, before it’s no longer me making them.”
I shook my head. “That’s not how it works,” I told him. “You’ll still be you once your two personalities merge. In fact, I think you’ll be more you afterwards than you are now. You’ll be the you from Earth and the you from Equestria. The two can co-exist, you know.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Shining, sighing.
“In fact,” I said idly. “You may be more the you from Earth than from Equestria. I think you’ve lived longer here than you did there. How old was Shining when he was cursed?”
Shining thought for a moment, obviously glad to be on a throwaway subject. “23, from what I can tell,” he said finally. “Which would make Spike...?” he asked.
“Fifteen,” I replied.
Shining looked surprised. “Really? He seemed very small for a fifteen-year old, at least, from what I saw of him in the show.”
I shrugged. “Dragon aging, I suppose. Dragons age so slowly, fifteen is probably still considered a toddler age for them.” We continued on in our conversation for about another hour or so before we finally arrived at the museum. As far as museums go, it was completely average. It was your basic block of building, complete with a cliche faded banner announcing an exhibit that had probably been over for months now. As we approached the grounds, I noticed that all the lights in the building were off. As far as I could see, there were no security guards in sight. The building looked completely abandoned.
“Are we sure that the journal’s even still in here?” Kate asked, looking at David. “It has been fifteen years. Maybe it was moved from when you last saw it.”
David shook his head. “I don’t think so. I saw it just a few years ago when I visited here last. It’d already been up for twelve years at that point, as part of some Local Treasures collection. I can’t imagine they’d have had any reason to move it to storage or anything.”
We went up to the front door. “So how do we get in?” Shining Armor asked. “I don’t happen to know a lockpicking spell.”
“We could just try kicking it in,” suggested David.
“I might be able to fly us up to a window one at a time if we needed to,” Kate contemplated.
“How about the front door?” I said, pushing the door smoothly inward.
“Oh. Well, I suppose that works too,” said David, walking past me into the building.
We walked down the main hallway, both Shining and Kate lighting up their horns to illuminate the building. The main hall was very large, with most of the space at the center taken up by a large model reenactment of a scene from what was the Battle of Gettysburg, according to the plaque below it. Figures. The museum was so run down it couldn’t even afford a giant dinosaur skeleton. We made our way down one of the secondary corridors branching off of the main hallway, behind the center admissions desk. “We shouldn’t have to go far,” said David, his voice at a whisper. “The room we’re looking for should be on the third floor, close to the back.” We all nodded and proceeded onward.
Shining Armor was frowning, deeply troubled. “It shouldn’t be that easy,” he murmured. “There should have been an alarm, or something. The door should have at least been locked. I don’t like this.”
I shrugged. “It’s a pretty run-down museum,” I responded. “There’s probably not enough in here to warrant protecting.” Shining didn’t look convinced. The further through the building we walked, the more nervous he got.
Eventually, he turned to face the rest of us. “Look, I have a really bad feeling about this. We should have heard at least one security guard by now. This place has to at least have a surveillance room. I’ll go and check it out. You guys go on ahead.”
David was hesitant. “We can’t let anyone know we were here,” he said. “What if you’re discovered?”
“I won’t be,” said Shining reassuringly. “I don’t even need to make it all the way to the surveillance room. I just need to find someone. This place is way too empty to be normal. I have to know what’s going on.”
“How will you be able to meet up with us, though?” David asked.
I looked around and grabbed some brochures and a nearby pen from off the wall and stuck them into Shining’s saddlebag. I also grabbed some for us. “There,” I said. “Now, if he needs to contact us, he can send a scroll-message, and as long as I stick with you guys, we can send one back.”
“Alright,” said David, looking uncertain. With a nod and a quick smile, Shining Armor ran down a side passage and into the darkness. I hopped up onto David’s back and we continued onwards. As we walked, I could tell that something was wrong with David.
“What’s up?” I asked him.
He sighed. “I’m just wondering.”
“About what?” I pressed.
“About the watch,” he said, gesturing his head towards the saddlebag that contained it.
“What’s the matter? Not excited to finally get it open?” I asked.
David turned to me, eyebrows raised. “Finally get it open? Spike, this watch contains the mind of a 1200 year old alien, a mind that, when released, is going to rapidly occupy the space that my mind is currently sharing with no-one. I don’t think it’s going to be a matter of me getting used to all those memories, I think it’s going to be a matter of the Doctor getting used to the little there is of me.”
I sat, thunderstruck. How had I not seen that before? I didn’t have any words. David turned and looked back at me, seeing my shocked face. He snorted “Relax,” he said. “I’m not some fractured personality brought on by an overstressed mind. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to be absorbed into the Doctor’s psyche. At the very least, we’ll have enough time to work out a solution if the situation does end up being a problem. After all, he is the Doctor, right? Still,” he sighed. “It is a little disconcerting.” He looked up. “Ah! Here we are!”
We entered the room in question. It was rather large, being about twenty yards from one side to the other. It was a square room, with glass cases lining three walls of the chamber. The fourth wall was taken up by a large stained glass panel depicting a medieval battlefield. Several suits of armor holding assorted weaponry surrounded the painting behind a cautionary velvet rope. The floor was made of a polished tile, and Kate and David’s hooves clacked against it loudly as we made our way into the room.
We spotted the Journal, set in its own glass case over against the wall. It sat there on a cushion, small and unassuming in a navy blue cover. The words Journal of the Timekeeper were scrawled at the top in flowing gold letters. The book had two lines running down front, perpendicular to each other, dividing the cover into four sections, like the squares on a door. A little plaque at the bottom read: “The Journal of the Timekeeper. An unknown, unopenable book. Found locally.” We all stared at it for a few minutes.
“All right,” said David. “We need to get this thing out of here. Kate, can you lift the glass on it?”
Kate stepped up to the pedestal and both her horn and the glass around the book began to glow a bright light blue. After a couple of seconds of straining later, Kate stopped, gasping for breath. “It’s no good,” she panted. “The case is bolted down.”
“Fine then,” said David, facing the book. “I guess we’ll have to do things the hard way.” He turned his back on the book and crouched down onto his front hooves. He lifted his back ones off of the floor and coiled into position, ready to explode with force. He was interrupted by a large belch that echoed around the room, which was followed up by a billowing cloud of smoke which coalesced into a pamphlet. I opened it up to read a hastily scrawled message from Shining. Something’s very wrong. No one’s in the guard room and the screens are all broken. Every screen’s staticky. We have to go. Now.
I dug a pen out of Kate’s bag. “It’s a message from Shining,” I said to the expectant David, who was still crouching in position.
“It says we need to get out of here,” I replied.
David shook his head. “Tell him we can’t go yet. We’re about to get the book.” I scribbled furiously for a few seconds, and then engulfed the pamphlet in flame. The smoke disappeared down the passage behind me. It came back a few seconds later reading: No. We need to go now. Where are you? I relayed the directions to our positions. This time, only a scrap came back. On my way, it said.
“Hurry,” I told David. “We need to get out of here, quick.”
“Stand back,” said David.
Unnerved by the situation, Kate and I retreated a good ten feet away from the case. David kicked behind him with all his force. An ear splitting crash resounded through the room. Shards of glass rained down upon the ground below the pedestal. We sat still, listening hard. Once the sound of the shattering glass died away, we noticed something else: Nothing. There was no alarm. By this point, even David was beginning to get nervous.
He reached out and grabbed the book in between his hooves, trying to open it with his teeth. “It won’t budge!” he cried, frustrated. He turned the book over, looking for an answer. There, on the back of the cover, was a dark spot, hoof sized and shaped, and of a different shade of blue than the rest of the journal. Tentatively, David reached out and put his hoof on the spot. It flashed green several times. “DNA Authorization Confirmed.” spoke a voice. There was a click, and the cover of the journal now swung freely.
“Come on,” I hissed, motioning at David to join us. “We have to go.” But David wasn’t listening. He picked up the book and turned it to the front, opening the cover. “It’s blank,” he muttered, apparently to himself. “But it’s hollow,” He bent his nose down to the book and came away holding a small silver key to his teeth. He turned and dug the pocket watch out of his bag. He held the watch in the crook of his arm and stuck the key into the keyhole where one sticks the key to wind up the watch. A small, audible click echoed through the room. Reaching up with a trembling hoof, David pressed the button on top. The watch opened with a click.
************************************************************
Shining Armor ran down the hallway, muttering under his breath. Why wasn’t anyone understanding him? They were in big trouble. They had to leave this instant. Forget about some stupid book. It wouldn’t do them one bit of good if they were all dead. He thought back on the scene he had witnessed just moments earlier. The surveillance room. The whole place had been turned upside down. Every single TV screen had been turned on and filled with static. The volume had been turned off on each, so that the entire room was filled with an eerie bluish-white light and silence.
As he galloped down the hallway, he passed a side corridor. He checked it to make sure that it wasn’t the one he was looking for. It wasn’t. It was the statue gallery. He was about to turn away, when something caught his eye. He turned and shone the light on a group of objects at the back of the room.
As the light focused on them, they came into view, and his blood turned to ice. He stood there, transfixed in silent horror at the objects before him. Eventually, he shook himself from his stupor and tore his gaze from the sight of the sixteen statues. He galloped down the hall, at double the speed he started with. There was no time for warnings, no time for letters. He needed to get to his friends, or die trying. As the unicorn went down the hall, his light went with him, and no longer shone on each of the security badges the stone statues were still wearing.
Shining Armor tore down the hallway. He saw the sign of the room he was looking for: Local Treasures. He ran into the doorway. He saw David, standing near a pile of broken glass, holding the pocket watch, Kate and Spike standing some distance away. He saw David press a button on top of the watch, saw the watch open and an orange light begin to spill forth from the watch, swirling around David, engulfing him in light.
He did not see the spear that lanced out from the shadows of a nearby hallway. It sliced through the air, thrown faster than any human hand could possibly manage. It cut across the intervening distance like a stainless steel bullet. The spear struck David and passed through, sticking into the wall a half-foot away.
David looked down at the part of the spear still in him, then looked up at his friends in utter shock and pain. The orange light swirled around and sank into him, disappearing completely. He gave a sigh, closed his eyes, slumped against the wall, and died.