//------------------------------// // Prologue // Story: Unravel // by Skamikaze //------------------------------// “So where did you come from?” Twilight asked Starswirl the Bearded's Timetravel Compendium, scratching her neck as if she could itch the answer out of her mane. The book lay in the light of the morning sun pouring in from the window, looking like a gift from divinity; something that it probably was. Books were not supposed to appear out of nowhere lying on top of one's desk, especially if that desk was Twilight Sparkle's. But this one had. She had tried to find all sorts of ways the priceless book could have come her way. She had searched high... Dear Princess Celestia, Not that I'm not grateful in the event that what I suspect is true, but, did you actually send me- She had written that with her horn-writing going completely illegible by the end. The collected and calm response had been a negative to her question. She had searched in the middle... “Spike, do you know about this?” She'd quizzed the dragon while he was sweeping up the dust from one of Rainbow's interminable collisions. He'd been rather put-off, and had just grunted. Some of the dust made its way into Twilight's lungs, initiating a painful coughing fit. “Spike, this book is more than worth its weight in gold! And it just happened to arrive on my tabletop!” Twilight tearfully reiterated. “Well I dunno, Twilight. We must have had it since the beginning. Celestia knows how many strange books are hidden in this tree.” Disappointed on that end, she'd even searched the relatively insane realm of probability, namely Pinkie Pie, because you could never discount her involvement. “Wow! A book! Where did that one come from?” She'd asked obliviously. “That's what I'm trying to find out Pinkie,” Twilight muttered. And then she had searched low... She had sent a letter to Princess Luna asking if she had a hoof in that book's appearance, as if it could be some mysterious benefaction kept under wraps from Celestia for some reason. A thoroughly linguistically-tangled letter assured her that it was not so. On a whim, she asked her Owl about it too. No answers there either. Sighing, she sat down in front of her desk, hoofs resting on the satin-smooth cover of the priceless book, daring herself to open it. She couldn't bring herself to, though. It felt like stealing. Books of that importance could only be accessed after a proper amount of procedural haggling. To have it at the end of your hooftips with no price to pay was... unsettling, to say the least. She looked out the window, and she saw herself trotting down the road with Miss Cheerilee. After a few seconds of incomprehension, the table went flying, and Starswirl's book was going to go along with it until a glow of telekinesis saved it and set it back on a shelf. Twilight, shocked beyond belief, ran out of the library and onto the street. “Woah! Watch the floor, Twilight! I just cleaned the darn thing up!” Spike gasped. Twilight bumped into a couple of ink bottles that shattered in her wake. Out she rushed, and she reached the end of the street just in time to see her tail vanishing behind a house with an Ivy encrusted balcony. She gave chase, but by the time she could see around the corner her prey had vanished. So had Cheerilee. Looking around and glancing behind a curtain of the thick vines, she tried to poke them out into the open out of whatever cubbyhole they might have sprouted themselves into. She even teleported onto the top of the house she was next to, giving herself an enhanced vantage point, but she obtained no view of what she wanted to see. Pinpricks of worry assaulted her, worry that seemed to go straight to her stomach. Another Twilight roaming around town could not be a good thing. For all she knew, it could be a malevolent imposter who was doing Celestia knew what harm to the innocent citizens of ponyville. Maybe it was a changeling! Twilight already knew what was really happening though. The book's arrival was too well timed. Twilight teleported and set her hooves on the ground, shivered a little, then made her way back to the library. She opened the door to see a floor devoid of inkstains and three perfectly sound inkbottles where there had only been shards and puddles. Feeling the beginnings of guilt as well as the unpleasant feeling of nerves, she hastened to get its uncomfortable load off of herself. “Spike, I'm sorry about the bottles, I- How did you fix them, anyways?” She asked, looking over the objects in question, searching for any flaws in their reconstruction. “Um, you just came and fixed them a few seconds ago? I thought you were back in your room, why'd you go back outside?” Spike's befuddled voice came from the cupboard where he kept his cleaning tools. Twilight's left eye twitched exactly three times. She walked upstairs into her room, holding back a scream full of half-mixed unpleasant feelings that really wanted out. She opened the door to see the tail end of a timetravel spell carrying her other self off to who knew when. She fell back down on her rump, in the same place she had been sitting down on before she saw herself outside and clutched the edge of a hoof to her forehead. Time-travel. She was time-travelling, and she had seen herself going around Ponyville and then back while she had gone chasing herself. She glanced over to the book and saw it opened to a specific page on the readjusted desk. It was a spell targeted to go into the future. That was news for Twilight; She had not known that Starswirl had worked on that version of the spell too. With a squeal unsuited to the moment, she thought about just what kind of a treasure she had in her grasp. She just couldn't resist it. She read the spell in its entirety, letting the colours of that particular magic permeate her understanding completely. “Huh,” she thought. “It's pretty simple, just slightly altered from the other time travel spell I used.” She shook her head, shaking the wonder and awe out of it. Why would I be jumping all over time in the first place? She thought and she thought, and she didn't like the ideas she was getting. Granted that she had been worrying over nothing the last time this had happened, but still. Anything could have necessitated the usage of those spells. And whyever would she want to go to the future? “Ugh. I don't like this, Spike,” she moaned to her assistant later in the evening, an assistant who was having a hard time believing all the things that had come out of the mare's mouth. “Of all the things that could have gone wrong in Ponyville, why did it have to start with a book? And such a great book too.” “Oy, don't get me started,” the dragon muttered. “Everything that happens here started with a book, Twilight.” “Yes, well,” Twilight struggled to find the right words to express her anxiety. She already had the telltale signs of stress wormed onto her face, and its tendrils were starting to find their way into her mind. Her thrice accursed gifted gifted gifted mind. “You know what happened last time, Spike. I fretted over a Time Travel spell for days and all it turned out to be was a useless circle of wasted time.” Spike was cradling the sleeping body of Peewee, The phoenix having dropped by with his parents for a while; parents that were rather concerned about the time, as their sunward glances suggested. “But more importantly, I made the jump back in time anyways. So if I've already seen myself doing it, does it mean I'm pretty much doomed to do it?” “I dunno Twilight, sounds like future-Twilight's problem to me,” Spike chuckled. He brought the baby phoenix over to Twilight and held him out, and the unicorn took him into her forehooves, cradling the precious little thing. “But If you're so worried about it, why don't you just lock the book away? If you don't know the spells, you won't be able to jump around in time, and then you'll have nothing to worry about.” Twilight looked at the peaceful child she cradled, and the desire for such peace of mind made her decision for her. “Okay, Spike. I'll tell the Princess that I'm entrusting the book to her for safekeeping and she can keep it with her. Who knows, she'll probably be really glad to see it too.” “Cool. Just so long as it keeps you from getting another eyepatch,” Spike laughed. He woke his avian friend up, and his parents took over, guiding the sleepy firebird off to their home in the mountains. Spike waved for a while into the setting sun before heading back inside. Caught in the beauty of the moment, Twilight followed him outside and looked around. She breathed the fresh air, stretched her tired legs, looked at the numerous colourful, happy souls that populated her town, and felt silly for feeling so conflicted all morning. All that went out the window when she saw another image of herself wandering around with Rarity, headed off towards the oddly named boutique her friend managed. The sight was troubling in itself, and Twilight felt the strange urge to go and drape a bag over the other Twilight's head and drag her down to her basement. Celestia knew the sorts of things her image could reveal about what was happening there. She then realized that she had the book; she could find out anytime she wanted to. She then stopped thinking for a while as she witnessed her image nuzzling her friend's ear, then giving her a short, sweet kiss, a kiss that Rarity accepted with a giggle and returned a few moments later. Indeed, she stopped thinking for so long that she didn't realize that she had until the sun had gone down and Spike had shouted out that he was going to lock her out. She shuffled back inside, on the verge of letting the memory run through her mind again, but stopping before she could collapse out of the sheer absurdity of it. And so it was that Twilight Sparkle, protege of the Princess and bearer of the element of magic, nearly unraveled the fabric of the universe with rampant time-travel not for some epic quest to save the world or in the name of scientific inquiry, but to see just what the heck her future-self was thinking.