Twilight Sparkle's eye shot open. At first, she couldn't see anything but a haze of green. Slowly, objects came into focus. She could see ponies walking about beyond the layer of green, though they were stretched and distorted. Her body didn't feel quite right, either. As she moved her legs around, she could feel resistance. She tried to open her mouth, but found that something was keeping it clamped around something. Something long. A tube that hung down from the low ceiling above her. A tube that she could feel all the way down her throat.
Panic began to set in, and she thrashed against the bindings around her hooves. One of the distorted ponies came over to her and poked his hooves at something outside of her vision. Slowly, the green around her receded downward, though the ponies within her sight remained stretched. Now that the green was gone, Twilight felt cold and wet, her body dripping with the liquid she'd been submerged in for who knew how long.
The distortion was removed as the front of Twilight's little prison was removed. Outside of the tube were other ponies, as well as many pipe and strange machines that Twilight had never seen before. The pony who had apparently released her reached up and pulled the tube from her throat, and she gasped. Her lungs burned, as did her eyes. The other pony removed her restraints and gingerly placed her down on the floor. She tried to stand, but found that her legs could not support her. She tried to speak, but only managed a brief squeak.
The other pony draped a towel over her body, rubbing her coat dry as a door on one wall opened. A familiar sight walked through the door, and Twilight was able to bring her head up and squeak again in response. Princess Celestia smiled her soft, reassuring smile, and leaned down to nuzzle the purple alicorn.
"Welcome back to the land of the living, Princess. I am sure that you have many questions, and I shall answer them all in good time. For now, let us simply say that we princesses of Equestria are not quite as long-lived as most would believe. I am sorry that you had to find out this way, but the scheduled meeting just kept getting pushed back, and I never got the chance to tell you."
Twilight was shaking, and not just from the cold in the room. Her eyes traveled beyond Celestia, taking in the vast arrays of cylindrical tanks filled with green liquid. Inside each one was a pony, hooves bound and muzzle wrapped in a strange device connected to the ceilings of their tanks by tubes. She could recognize the ponies in the tubes. There was Princess Celestia, despite her standing right there. There was Princess Luna, and Princess Cadance. Had Twilight been capable, she would have screamed upon seeing who the last set of ponies in the tanks were.
They were her.