Great. Just splendid.
Jade thought as she darted into another house, grimacing at the fresh screams floating through the air behind her. She could stop for nopony; her mission, and the VIP’s were too important. She climbed up the stairs of the house, slamming the window open and climbing out onto the roof. The rough shingles provided good grip as she scaled up to the top, getting a good vantage point on her target.
Despite her height and element of surprise, the arc of magic that ripped through the roof at her hooves proved that her plan had backfired rather quickly. Jade scrambled back, tripping on the apex of the roof and tumbling down the other side. Rolling at the last second, she leaped off the crumbling house and through the upstairs window of the next building, again landing in a pile of shattered glass.
“Bucking hell!” Jade shouted, limping through the hallway she had landed in with renewed energy. “Enough with the glass, for Faust’s sake!” This unicorn was good, she’d give her that. But that didn’t mean she had to like it.
She stumbled down the stairs of the building at a sprint, rounding the corner-
And nearly running flat-out into a bloody, paint covered pony leaning against the door to what looked like the garage, one of her hooves playing absent-mindedly with the corner of her black jacket. A jacket that looked vaguely familiar…
Just as Jade was about to shove her out of the way and run into the promising safety of the garage, the green earth pony grinned, despite the worrying amount of blood dripping in rivulets out of the corner of her mouth.
“Hey sexy,” she started. Jade froze in her tracks, taking a good look at the beaten pony. She had to resist an angry face-hoof. The familiar looking pony’s smile grew, and she lazily flicked her hoof toward the door she was leaning on. “Don’t go in here. It’s not as cool as it looks.”
Then, she promptly collapsed, sliding down the door and leaving a streak of blood and acrylic stains along the wood panels.
Jade growled. “Seriously? What did I do wrong?” the pony gave her no real answer as she lay, presumably dead, on the hallway carpet. She stepped over herself angrily, leaving her future self to bleed out on the floor. She couldn’t help it if she was an idiot in another part of the timeline.
Soft hoofsteps sounded above, alerting Jade to the immediate problem at hoof. Her counterpart was already gone, leaving only her colourful streak of bodily fluids against the door that presumably lead to her death. For a crazy second, Jade considered going into the door, just to spite herself.
She shook the thoughts out of her head, and used the only other door in the hallway. When she opened it, she darted out of the house and into the street, making sure to stay out of sight from the house. She slipped into another alley, moving along the wall carefully, not wanting to make the same mistake as her now past self.
That was one of the interesting aspects of the job, Jade mused. Every once and a while, on a dangerous mission, she would stumble into a situation that she just couldn’t handle, either almost dying or finding it too difficult. When these rare occurrences happened, she was always surprised to find a future version of herself, usually beat up and exhausted, greeting her with a, “Hey sexy.” That was when she knew that something with what she was doing was about to go very awry, resulting in her death, or the death of her assigned VIP’s in a way that she could prevent.
Jade thought back to the first time she had been forced to warn herself away from imminent death. She had learned since then, although the possible consequences of a slip-up involving her different timelines still scared her immensely.
It was on her first real mission that she ran into trouble big enough to cause her to lose her life. It had been a shock, and somewhat of a strange relief to see herself standing backstage of the mayor of Manehattan’s victory speech, with a large caliber round through her left lung from a would-be assassin. She had thought that her watch was like the key to immortality, an instant reset button whenever she so chose. This was an assertion that had been stomped out upon her return to base.
She flinched while running, remembering the verbal lashing that had occurred the day of her ‘death’.
“You mother-bucking imbecile! Weren’t you listening in Basic?”
She hadn’t listened in Basic, for the record. It was in the debriefing room after the victory speech that her excitement of never dying was crushed into smithereens. From the two and a half hour scolding and demotion that had occurred, Jade had managed to find out that this abuse of her power not only was a serious breach in protocol, but it also threatened the very stability of space and time.
At the time, Jade had been incredulous, casting doubt onto Sigma’s claims. Then, she was told what could have occurred.
In her Basic Jumper Training, (or the part she had listened to anyway) Jade had learned that the common phrase, ‘Mother Nature doesn’t build in straight lines’ applied to literally everything. The common misconception of time is that it is a linear system, travelling in a straight line, forever forwards. This was not true. Time, it turned out, was represented in a giant circle, moving in oscillatory-like waves.
It was true, albeit, that the circle would never actually connect with the beginning, instead spiralling inwards infinitesimally. It was an enormous spiral, moving just shy of the last rotation, but never touching it. It was explained -in dusty and graphic detail- how every function of time worked, and how it was represented on a graph.
She had gotten a quick overlay of this during her reprimand, leaving her sitting in the uncomfortable chair, waiting for the colonel’s rage to cool down. To her dismay, it never did, instead escalating into more heated yelling as he ‘kindly’ informed her of how her ‘Fancy-shmancy watch’ actually worked.
An hour later, she was no closer to discovering what she had done wrong. She had, though, discovered that her watch used a strong magical pulse that was imperceptible to a normal pony’s senses to bring the oscillatory waves of time closer together in a targeted area, creating a shorter wavelength. It was explained to her in a much calmer voice by Doctor Linctus that it performed much like the
Doppler Effect, with the distance between the waves getting smaller and smaller the closer it got to the point of reference, or in this case, Jade.
At the point where it collided with the immediate space surrounding the point of reference, the waves of time get so close together that they start to repel each other, kind of like the same ends of a magnet. The waves will gather so close around the watch, that all matter, that being light, space, and sound, are all pushed away from in between the coalescing waves, leaving a tear in physical space. The time waves can never touch, so by halting their forward progress, one could control the size of the rip to a certain degree.
This presented a problem for researchers when they first harnessed this knowledge and ability. The very first pony to actively test this system was obliterated, as his biological structure was classified as being a part of ‘all matter’, and he was literally pushed to pieces by the repelling energy of the time waves. Scientists later discovered that by bending the waves closest to the point of reference, they could create a form-fitting bubble of time that protected both the subject’s atomical structure, and their necessities, such as a stable body temperature and integrity of their bones.
From there, the time-bubble encompassed pony would exit their frame of time through the rip, angling themselves so that when they left their timeframe, they would move on the inside of the gigantic spiral of time and intersect with another segment of it, either earlier, or later down the spiral. As the spiral is always moving, not angling yourself properly could result in a complete miss of your intended target, falling too short or too far above the intended point in time. When you re-open the rip in the other time frame, the first thing you had to do was close up the rip, and carefully move the waves of time back into their original positions to avoid literally breaking all of time.
It was at this point that Jade was dawning on the fact that she may have royally screwed up. What if she had accidentally crossed over her own rip while it was still open by going back to the same space that her past-self had occupied? Her eyes had nearly bugged out of her head when Linctus explained to her that she had actually done just that.
He then went on to compare their way of traveling through time, and the normal way of traveling through time. While normally, we moved forward at a constant rate, it was like passing through a closed door by turning the handle and pushing. Their improvised ‘shortcuts’ through time resembled something more like encountering a closed door, and then blowing it open with gratuitous amounts of TNT. It didn’t just open the door, it blew open the wall, creating a much bigger space than what was needed.
The colonel had informed her none so nicely, that jumping backwards or forwards in time anywhere within the frame of exactly ninety-point-two-seven hours, or three-point-seven-six days from the original jump, was risking the structural basics of the universe.
Although the rips close up, the large tunnel that led to it still exists, very slowly healing itself. If one were to cross into the pre-dug space of one of these tunnels, it is not only uncomfortable for the Jumper, but also uncomfortable for the universe.
Uncomfortable as in, ‘Could unravel reality’ uncomfortable. These intersecting tunnels through time were labelled, mala meus, or just simply mala. Translated directly from ancient Latin, it apparently meant ‘My Bad’. As it was a big problem, scientists set about trying to find a way past it. Instead, they found a limitation that proved both a relief and a curse.
They found out that the maximum amount of times that one could pass through their mala was approximately six. Past that, the theory was that the spiral of time would degrade quickly to the point of collapse. This, of course was only a theory, as the universe had not been pushed to the point of near destruction yet. And Jade was determined that she would not be the one responsible for the collapse of reality.
She bolted across the street, mentally kicking herself in the shins for her carelessness. She hadn’t had reason to create a mala for a good year and a half, as far as she could tell. It was hard to tell how fast actual time progressed, especially when you spent most of it either underground, or in inter-temporal rifts.
Another one of those incessant beeps sounded from her watch. She skidded to a halt around a corner, pressing her back up against the hard stone and breathing rather heavily. Even with her extensive training and endless drills that were imposed on her in Basic, she was still surprised at how out of shape she was. She hadn’t run this far since popping up accidentally in a dragon’s cave when she mistimed a jump.
Jade cast a hasty glance down at the device, her body still tensed to run for her life from the inevitable flying beams of death from her unshakable pursuer. After a couple of seconds, she realized that no beams of energy had flown her way for a while now, something that had completely gone over her head when she had been running.
She peeked her head around the corner, and saw nothing but an empty street. Well, mostly empty. Aside from the occasional screaming city resident, there was nopony to be seen, least of all a malicious, scarlet coated one.
Thoroughly confused, Jade looked closely at her watch, consulting it more carefully. Nothing seemed amiss, until she brought up the tracker.
Jade watched in shocked dismay as she watched the tiny, red holographic dot moving swiftly over the blue screen. But the dot was not following her. It was going in the opposite direction. Her heart dropped into her stomach when she realized where the dot’s path was taking it.
With another muttered curse and a swelling sense of panic, she bolted after the blinking dot, hoping against hope that she wasn’t too late.
***
Icani Lulamoon didn’t get mad.
At least, that’s what she kept telling herself, over and over as she chased the infuriating green earth pony through building after building, always one step behind. She had aborted using her destructive magic now, as it proved nothing except to weaken herself, however slightly. Instead, she would wait until the pony tripped up.
Except she never did.
Still reciting the mantra, a lady must never lose control, she nonchalantly blew the door off another house, growling as she saw the flick of a tail round the corner, just out of her sight. Lady Lulamoon trotted past a bloodstained door, her every intention set on catching and killing the elusive pony in the most painful way possible.
That was, until she heard the keening wails of her Vraals in the distance.
She daintily cocked her head toward the sound, flicking her ears slightly and she felt like she was coming out of a kind of trance. Why was she wasting her time with one pony? No matter how irritatingly intrusive the pony was, her own quest for power remained her top priority.
Casting one more malicious look in the general direction of the fleeing pony, Lady Lulamoon huffed and turned her tail, teleporting on top of a nearby roof to better see her beasts. Once she was on top of the roof, she felt a particular twinge of anger toward herself, as she realized the obvious advantage of teleportation she held over her green prey.
No matter. She was done with that ground-pounder now. Eyes on the prize, Icani.
It did not take her long to pinpoint the Vraals, with their frequent screeches, the plumes of smoke and the cries of hapless victims getting in their way. Lady Lulamoon smiled. It would not be long before they found Velvet and her usurper offspring via the mental message she kept coursing through their mangled brains.
Find them. Kill the mare. Leave the foal.
In quick bouts of teleportation, Lady Lulamoon jumped her way across the rooftops of Canterlot, curiously trailing the path of fire and blood left in the Vraals’ wake. With rising amusement, she realized that Velvet was heading towards the one place that could possibly save her. The castle.
Not that she’d ever get there in time.
And with that thought, Lady Lulamoon closed in.