Twilight Sparkle was neck deep in a pit of her own creation. And she could not be happier. It wasn't quite studying magic or astronomy, but over the years she had acquired a fondness for archaeology. It was, after all, another way to learn more about the world.
“Its like the whole world is a book, you just have to learn how to read it,” Twilight mused aloud. Turning to set her tools down she was startled by an unexpected visitor. “Gah! Princess Celestia, I didn't see you there.”
The Princess chuckled softly. “I just wanted to see you in your element. And please, just call me Celestia.” A warm smile on her face.
“Sorry Prin--- er ,Celestia, old habits and all that.” Twilight said, rubbing the back of her head.
“I know the feeling. So what can you tell me about this find, in your last report you made it sound important.”
“Of course.” Twilight was only too eager to share her finding and speculation. “As you know from our experiments with the Quantum Mirror that our universe is very unusual. Most others are huge containing billions of suns, moons and planets. Ours by comparison only has the one sun, one moon and one planet. And our ‘stars’ are magical objects not too far from us. That is probably the strongest evidence for my new hypothesis.”
Celestia dutifully asked the obvious question. “And what is your new hypothesis?”
“That our universe is artificially constructed.”
Celestia was still not quite used to all of Twilight’s new terminology, but as far as she understood the idea she was genuinely surprised. “I think you may need to explain this one to me Twilight. I have believed that our world has always existed.”
“I know Princess, I did too, but we didn’t really have any evidence for that. Its a matter of probabilities. What is more likely, our universe having been created so that from the surface of the planet it superficially resembles the naturally occurring universes but can be influenced by pony magic, or that it has always existed, which still doesn’t answer the question of how the universe exists at all.” Twilight took a second to catch her breath as Celestia digested this.
“And you believe your find here is evidence in support of this hypothesis?”
“In conjunction with the find in Zebrica last year, I do.”
Celestia shuddered at the memory. “I don’t like to think of that thing. I regret that it had to be destroyed but it was a threat to my little ponies.” The giant crab like thing was black as night and seemed to be alive even after millennia underground . Many ponies still had nightmares about it, its screeches echoing through their minds.
“It was dangerous. You did what you had to Princess. But back to the matter at hand. I believe that was a vessel, like one of our airships, only much more advanced. And, I believe this is a vessel too.” Twilight pointed into her digsite. There were long protrusions on the body of the thing, like tentacles on a squid. The entire vessel was green with black markings here and there.
“I think this was the competitor race to the ones who built the crab-ship. Looking at the basic components of our world think they each represented a basic aspect of magic: Chaos and Order. Given the results of our encounter the crab-ship people seem to be Chaos. This race -” pointing at the squid-ship “- seem to represent order.
“Essentially, we are a proving ground. We were supposed to determine which philosophy is superior. I don’t think they would have imagined that we would find a third way. The harmony for friendship and finding strength in each other’s differences shows that chaos and order are both incomplete.”