Twilight plodded hastily along beside her armoured escort, struggling slightly to match her own tiny hoofsteps to his long, powerful gait. The guard noticed her plight and slowed down, allowing her to run at a comfortable pace while holding his outstretched hoof in a tight, fearful clamp.
Most ponies would have trouble hobbling at a decent speed with only three hooves to work with, but Victus had gone through rigorous training for the feat, insisted upon by his clingy foals. When the two little fillies weren’t climbing his back or hanging off his wings, they were leading him around with each of his sturdy hooves clutched in their adorable, inescapable grasp.
The guard and the foal moved with a hasty urgency through the large doors of the palace, both trying their best to ignore the sounds of battle going on behind them. As the doors closed behind them, Victus breathed a sigh of relief, slowing his trot to a walk and turning his attention to Velvet’s daughter.
She had grown since last he had seen her, although that was to be expected. Still, two years had done favours to the small filly, as he could see by her healthy body and lengthening horn. Victus doubted that Twilight remembered him at all, and had probably just gone with him at her mother’s insistence. He decided to break the ice to calm her down before she got too uncomfortable in the presence of a stranger.
“So,” he began slowly, choosing his words carefully. “It’s, uh… been a while, huh ‘Twi?”
Twilight stiffened at the name, puffing out her lip and raising her head indignantly. “Only daddy can call me that.” She said softly, tenseness flooding her shoulders.
“Yeah, Nightlight always did have an affinity for abbreviations.” Victus mused, mostly to try and gain himself some sort of association with the filly. Twilight looked up at him, confused.
“You… you knew daddy?”
Victus chuckled as their hooves came into contact with the plush rug in the hallway. “Sure did kiddo. Weren't you listening to your mom? I knew him way back when, when he was still a nerdy little colt in grade school.” He cast a sideways glance at Twilight, gauging her reactions. “Y’know, when dinosaurs ruled the earth.”
That earned him a small giggle. “He’s not that old!”
The guard smiled. “Are you sure? Because I’m pretty sure I remember me and him riding to school on stegosauruses and pterodactyls!”
“Nuh-uh!” insisted Twilight, now smiling a little. “Stegosauruses weren’t around at the same time as pterodactyls, silly!” she thought for a moment. “Or maybe that was the dimetrodons…”
Victus looked surprised. “The what-rodon?”
The filly looked up at him with an excited face that said, ‘you’re about to learn something!’. “The dimetrodons! They kinda looked like stegosauruses, only they had a frill on their back instead of pentagonal spines that helped regulate their body temperature. They lived in the Permian era!”
Victus gaped. “…How old are you again?”
Twilight’s chest puffed out proudly. “I’m ten-and-a-half, mister Victory!”
“Victus,” he corrected gently, still astounded by the amount of knowledge the foal contained. “You know a lot for a mare your age.”
The radiant smile coming off Twilight was positively infectious. He had hit the good stuff with that comment. “Mom says that too!” she leaned towards him conspiratorially, causing them to stop in the middle of the hallway. “She says I know more than daddy, but daddy knows a lot of stuff.”
Victus chuckled again, thinking of his school days with Nightlight. At first, Night’s parents had objected to him going to a normal school instead of an all-unicorn school, but Night had won the argument in the end. Good thing too, because he probably would have lost it at a formal school.
“See?” Twilight continued, offering him a crumpled, dirty, and ripped flyer in weak telekinetic grasp. Victus took it from her with his wingtip, and held it out in front of him.
“Princess Celestia’s school is taking students again?”
Twilight nodded confirmation. “Yup! My audition’s next Tuesday! Dad says I’m gonna get it for sure, but I just learned how to turn a page with my magic… I don’t think I’m good enough…”
Victus smiled reassuringly and patted her on the back with a wing. “I’m sure you’ll do fine kiddo. Once this whole fiasco blows over, I’m sure you’ll pass with flying colours!”
Twilight got quiet at that last remark. “Yeah. Once this is all over…”
The guard noticed her sudden drop in enthusiasm, and grimaced understandingly. “You’re worried about your dad, huh?” the filly nodded tearfully, sniffling.
“Well, I’ll tell you what,” Victus consoled, “Your dad may not look like much, but he’s a fighter. This one time, there was this kid who was getting bullied pretty much every day, and your dad got sick of it.”
Twilight looked up, intrigued. “W-what’d he do?”
Victus grinned in nostalgic remembrance. “I remember what he said to a tee. The kid had just got pushed over by three of the bullies, and Night just walked over and said, ‘You guys are just a bunch of egotistical morons. If your stupid egos were any bigger, you wouldn’t fit in through the door to class!’.”
Twilight’s eyes shone. “Really? What happened next?”
“Uh,” Victus rubbed the back of his head with a wing. “The bullies stopped picking on the kid…”
As young as she was, Twilight could see the exception hanging in the air. “But…”
“But,” he continued, “One of them turned around and clocked your dad in the face.” Twilight grimaced. “He had that bruise for weeks! But after the bully hit him, he just got really quiet… and the next thing we knew, the bully was hanging upside-down from the flag-pole!”
Twilight gasped. “Really?” she thought for a second. “Was the bully hurt?”
Victus shook his head. “Naw, just scared out of his wits. Night got a suspension, the kid got a scare, and I got a laugh. All’s well that ends well.”
They rounded the corner in a thoughtful silence, one in deep thought, and the other in nostalgia. As they trotted towards the throne room door Victus couldn’t help but notice the lack of guards in front of the door. Understandable, as there was a disaster going on outside. Getting uncomfortable, Twilight spoke again.
“Aren’t you worried about your family?”
Victus nodded sagely. “Yes, of course I am. I would have abandoned my post to collect them already if the kids weren’t in Cloudsdale visiting their aunt. Your brother's with them too, from what I understand. As far as I know, this isn’t happening there, so as long as Dandy, Lily and Shining stay put, they’ll be fine.”
A look of revelation passed over Twilight. “Oh! You’re Dandy’s dad! I remember her from Magic Kindergarten!” she shuddered at the memories.
“Yup, Iris and I were lucky enough to be blessed with both a unicorn, and a pegasus foal!” He looked slightly confused for a moment. “Though I don’t know how…”
Twilight still was unsettled. “What about your wife?”
Victus gave a booming laugh as they approached the door. “Believe me, she’ll be fine. If her right hook is any judge, Iris could fight off one of those beasts outside with her wings tied behind her back!”
Twilight smiled thoughtfully. She had been scared of Victus a couple of minutes ago, but now she thought he was pretty cool. Even if Dandy had been kind of mean to her in school.
Victus smiled as the foal at his side tightened her grip on his foreleg, not out of fear, but out of comfort. He was a couple of steps away from the door, and reached out his hoof to knock on the ornate golden designs.
A slight pop behind them made his hoof stall in its action. Against his better judgement, Victus looked over his shoulder at the source of the sound.
A cold blade drew a scarlet line across his throat, almost invisible against the red fur on his neck.
Victus stood for a second more, gasping raggedly through the hole in his neck, watching the carpet below stain with the blood gushing from his ruptured arteries. Then, he fell limply to his knees, keeling to the floor with a dull thud, Twilight’s screams echoing in his ears.
***
Outside in the courtyard, things were quieting down a little.
In addition to Jade’s kill, the two other Vraals had succumbed to the relentless stabbing and slashing of the royal guards, the last of them letting out another keening wail before three separate spears entered its neck at different angles, sending the beast twitching to the ground.
The remaining guards cheered as it hit the floor, a couple of them electing to make sure that the Vraals were finished. Black, foul-smelling blood poured in torrents from their decapitated necks, and the heads were thrown into a pile off to the side for later disposal.
Velvet still stared at Jade as the green earth pony tried her best to get the grass stains out of her black jacket, to no avail. Velvet realized that this was the very same pony that had distracted Icani after their duel, and was in no shortage of questions for her.
“Are you following me?” First and foremost.
Jade froze in her cleaning, twitching her ear in acknowledgement to the inquiry. One of the first rules to be abided by when becoming a Jumper is to avoid direct contact with your assigned VIP or target if at all possible. She could either come up with an excuse to cover for herself, or she could come clean and make the whole next part of the operation cleaner and easier.
“In a sense,” Jade admitted, abandoning her futile cleaning efforts. “Though I assure you, not with any malicious intent.” She cocked her head slightly. “Actually, completely opposite of malicious intent.”
Velvet just looked confused, though she had seen no reason to distrust this pony as of yet. “Then why are you following me?”
Jade grinned. This was the good part. Either Velvet would try to understand and agree to help her, or she would freak out and start running as fast as she could in the opposite direction. Jade took a breath.
“You have been assigned to me by the Temporal Control Agency -TCA for short- to make sure that no harm befalls you from forces including, but not pertaining to, aliens, rouge agents, assassins, power-hungry anarchists, incensed magicians, various forms of the undead, allergic reactions, high falls, feral beasts, psychotic masochists and most importantly, the mare you know as ‘Icani Lulamoon’.”
Velvet looked like she was going to interrupt, but Jade forged onwards, wanting to get this all out of the way early. Nine times out of ten, it worked out in her favour to let her VIP’s know early on what exactly was going on, and why exactly she was doing it. The other one time was when her VIP had actually turned out to be a sentient, shape-shifting puddle that had taken on the form of her VIP. That had been particularly painful.
“Mrs. Lulamoon, or the one you fought against in your house, is actually the Icani Lulamoon from about fifteen years from now, who got pissed at your daughter’s success and Celestia’s praise to your family. On a jealous whim, she broke into Starswirl’s vault of magic spells and activated a time-traveling spell that sent her back to now, in order to stop your Twilight from achieving Celestia’s favour and becoming her student.”
“Wha-”
“I’m not finished!” Jade exclaimed. “Due to the highly experimental and dangerous spell that Lulamoon used, the resulting bleed-off of magic from crudely ripping a rift in time has enamoured her to the point of insanity. It’s like getting a high off of Zap, only you have a pretty much unlimited pool of magic to draw from, which makes Lulamoon not only unstable, but very powerful. Wait,” Jade stopped herself with an outstretched hoof and a look of pondering. “Have you guys created Zap yet? No? Okay, never mind. It’s basically a debilitating hallucinogen that accelerates dopamine and epinephrine in your system to unbelievable levels, causing a really good feeling and lots of bright colours.
“Anyway, the TCA appointed me to guard you and your family from any and all of the aforementioned dangers, because apparently you guys are important to the timeline for some reason. I didn’t really pay attention to the dossier, but Twilight does something super important about fifty years from now, and any disruptions in the regularity of her pre-determined life will alter her existence so that she does something completely different, something probably catastrophic. Also, Lulamoon’s time rift is crossing over mine, creating an abnormality in the universe that we call a mala. If she does anything too drastic to agitate it, like, oh, I don’t know, cross over it four more times in the course of three days, the universe will collapse and time will stop working properly, crossing timelines over one another randomly, and crashing a bunch of delicate things into each other that are pretty important. So yeah, that’s why I’m following you in a nutshell, and why we should probably make sure your daughter is safe.” Jade bit her lip, thinking about anything she may have missed. There was always something.
“Oh yeah!” Jade exclaimed in recollection. She puffed out her chest proudly. “I’m a Time-Jumper!”
Jade didn’t envy the ground under Velvet’s jaw.
Once the thoroughly confused unicorn had picked her chin up from the floor, Velvet studied Jade in a way not unlike worry for Jade’s sanity. “Okay…” the doubt was evident in her tone.
Jade sighed impatiently. “Oh come on! I just saved your life twice in one day and killed a magically altered pony with nothing more than my knife and a discarded spear! Speaking of my knife…” she dropped to her knees and began searching the grass again for her blade.
Velvet approached the pony carefully, wary of her despite the seed of truth that had been planted in her brain. “So… you know about Icani Lulamoon?”
Jade stopped searching for a moment and rolled her eyes. “Yes, I know of Lulamoon. I know her place of residence, habits, favorite food, the works.” She turned around seriously. “She’s allergic to bananas.”
Velvet began to comprehend Jade’s earlier speech about the recent happenings. Something registered in her mind that chilled her to the bone. “Wait… you said that Twilight’s in trouble?”
“Yeah,” confirmed Jade, still rummaging for her weapon. Why did Celestia have to plant such thick grass? “But she’s probably okay, Lulamoon’s only just entering the castle now.”
“WHAT?”
“Aha!” Jade exclaimed as she procured her elusive knife from the grass and plants. “Found you!” stuffing the weapon into her jacket, she turned happily and asked none to politely, “What was that?”
“She’s in the castle!?” yelled Velvet, making Jade comprehend the ominous implications of her statement. “I thought you were supposed to protect her!”
Jade’s eyebrows knitted in realization, and she lifted the watch to her eye-level. Sure enough, the little red dot on her tracker was steadily approaching the green one, who was just outside the doors of the throne room accompanied by a grey dot.
She was about to lower the tracker and run for the castle doors when a shrill beep emanated from the watch, signalling a disruption in the temporal curve of the universe. Seconds later, another dot -this time black, with the numbers ‘10-1-4-5’ inside it- blipped onto the screen, just behind the green and grey ones.
Then, the grey dot disappeared.
Jade froze in shock and disbelief. The analytical part of her mind informed her that there were now three mala in existence in this time frame, three away from destroying the structural integrity of the universe. The other part of her mind focussed completely on the numbers inside the little black dot that was now heading slowly towards the green one.
10-1-4-5.
“Shit.”