'Twas not a good night to be Luna.
The day had started out as any other day had, with her rising with the falling of the sun, courtesy of her beloved sister, and preparing for the night ahead of her.
She had stood at her balcony and slowly used the connection she had with the night in order to arrange the stars in what was sure to be a spectacular showing. Once she was sure that was done, she used the same connection on beloved moon to raise it into the sky, darkening the heavens and slowly bringing the stars she had arranged oh so carefully to center stage, with her moon as the lead in her nightly show.
She had left her balcony feeling pleased with herself, letting her magic run on autopilot to slowly move the moon as the night went on.
Of course, her night simply had to come crashing down around her from there.
She had gone to go get ready for the night court which was to be convened at midnight, but she found the water in her room had run out of hot water. After a brief curse at her sister for hogging all the precious liquid of life, she went ahead and chose a cold shower, which was not fun at all.
Then, she trotted over to her dresser to find her royal regalia missing, with a small note attached to the cushion were it normally would have been placed reading "Sorry sister, but it appears you will have to go without it tonight."
So, Tia had taken both her hot water and her jewels marking her as a mare of royalty. She could have lived with that, knowing her sister loved to rile other ponies up in order to get a reaction to lighten up her day, but that wasn't all that had happened.
Since she could feel her anger rising, she decided to go ahead and sneak down into the kitchens for a brief snack. Both fortunately and unfortunately, she had ordered her staff to have the night off tonight, and now she was slightly regretting the decision to forgo eating a five star breakfast, but that also meant that she could have a snack at any time she wanted, such as she was doing at the moment.
So, she cantered over to the kitchens, and turned on the light.
Only to find her entire kitchen a wreck.
"..." She found herself unable to comprehend the scene in front of her, causing her brain to shut down her speech centers and forcing a wave of devastated silence upon herself.
Pots and pans lay strewn on the floor. Ingredients had been taken out of their containers and joined with their fallen metal ware cousins in the grounds sweet embrace. Confectionaries, once tall and proud under their glass containers, now rested like the ruins of ancient cities atop their silver platters. An infernal cold draped the large room, stemming from the open refrigerators that had been raided of their terrifyingly tempting treasures, leaving not but a void of light.
And then she spotted it. At the very end of the row of ice-white storage boxes was a peculiar blue box with a warm luminescence emanating from its open doors, standing rather inconspicuously against its brethren. This one she did not recall being there.
Her ears pricked up upon hearing voices resounding from said blue box as she approached it.
"... Mff hmph hmph hmm hmph hmmm?" Haha! She had found the heathen that had stolen all her snacks. She could here to pony chewing them right now!
"Derpy, what have I told you about eating with your mouth full?" She heard an accent similar to what Pip sounded like call out. She quickly moved forward, using her wings to lighten her hoofsteps. She was now outside the box, but decided now was not the time to enter. She made herself hidden behind the door of the mysterious object and placed an ear next on the side. "Also, can you grab me the didgeridoo from the corner? Oh, and the vuvuzela too!"
'Instruments?' Luna wondered. 'What sort of madpony plays insturments while raiding somepony’s kitchen?!’
"Heehee! Got it Doctor!" She could hear something being dragged. "Oof! This thing is heavy..."
"Don't hurt yourself, Derpy!" As soon as she heard the stallion (or, at least, she assumed it was based on the pitch), say those words, she heard a crash come from inside. "Derpy!"
"Oooooh..." Luna hoped that the mare (once again assuming based on pitch), was alright, although she couldn't help but feel a bit of vindication upon the thief of her saccharine treats getting her just desserts. "I'm alright!"
"Just remember to be careful on your-" she heard another crash, followed by a bang. "-*sigh*... Way up..."
Luna was now starting to become curious. She assumed that the box had some sort of space enlargement magic on it in order to be crashing around inside of a box no larger than the refrigerators it was near. She wondered if perhaps they were burglars and that tonight the kitchen was their quarry, which would explain the need for the box itself. Following that line of thought, she wondered if it had some of teleportation spell tuned onto the inside of it in order to make quick getaways, which would also make how it got there in the first place.
However, Luna had already learned her lesson on assumption making and its consequences. She would wait and see how this played out, despite the evidence to the pair being thieves.
She heard something akin to a thump coming from the interior of the box and the voices started up their conversation again.
"So, what did you need these things for again?" She heard the flapping of wings and then the sound of hooves meeting a solid surface. "And what is this thing?"
"Well, first question, I need these things to rouse the sleeping beast since you conked it over the head! The combination of the frequencies emitted from both of these should jump start its neural pathways and we can finally see what we have on our hooves!" A brief pause hung in the air. "And as for your second question... It's a Warp Worm!"
"...and what's a Warp Worm?"
"...I don't know!" She could feel the expression of exasperation and confusion on the Pegasus mare, if that was indeed what the companion was. "I came up with the name just now!"
"But, but... You know everything Doctor!" Luna highly doubted that. "But wait, if you don't know what it means..."
"It's a mystery! Isn't that exciting?" The gleeful tone of the stallion rebounded around his box and out into the kitchen. "A worm-like being that phases through our dimension like sand through a sifter, and I can't figure out why it’s here! I can just smell the adventure waiting around the corner..."
"That usually means a lot of trouble too, Doctor..."
"Oh, pish posh! It's just a cutesy little worm this time! I mean, our little escapade in capturing it did lead to the destruction of the kitchen of this nice establishment, but it didn't appear to be doing much harm other than playing the best game of hide-and-go-tag I've ever played in my entire lives! And, and!" She heard the mare giggle. "You, my dear, were the winner, and you netted yourself a nice bushel of delicious muffins for your effort!"
The giggling intensified before finally giving away to a proper thought. "Heehee, Doctor, you're making me blush..."
"However, we must remain vigil! Even if it didn't cause too much damage now, who knows what epidemic could happen in result of its sudden appearance... So, as a precaution, we're going to wake it and talk to it!"
Luna was sure the mare inside was just as confused as she was. "Talk to it? Doctor, it’s a worm..."
"A dimension phasing worm, Derpy! I have yet to meet a species that can do that in this universe that cannot form a proper method of communication!" Another pause permeated the inside of the box. "Well, I have yet to meet a dimension traveling species in this universe, but that's beside the point! Now Derpy, you take the vuvuzela while I will take the didgeridoo, and on the count of three, we will both blow! Got that?"
"Rodger dodger, Doctor!" Luna decided that listening was now going to be enough at this point, so she carefully aimed her head around the side of the door and into the box itself.
She had been expecting to see it be much larger on the inside, but she hasn't expected it to be quite that large, nor as... decorated, as it was. Tree-like pillars sprung from the floor, keeping a domed roof covered in golden lights aloft. A metal floor dominated the center of the room, with stairs leading down to the depths below, and in the very center of that platform was a large contraption of some kind with wires coming down from the top. Said contraption was surrounded in a hexagon of levers, switches, dials, and other technological goodies, with the center pillar of the device looking like some kind of pump.
Right in front of it were two ponies, one brown earth pony with a cutie mark in the shape of an hourglass, and one Pegasus mare with a green mane and a gray coat, a gaggle of bubbles acting as her cutie mark. Grasped in between the ponies hooves were the instruments they were talking about earlier, and in between the two instruments was a large glass jar, big enough to fit a filly. Inside the jar was a rainbow colored worm, coiled like a snake.
"Alright, one... Two..." Luna had then remembered that the instruments were rather loud and pulled her head back to cover her ears. "Three!"
VVRRRRROOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
Luna could feel the noise in her bones as the sound seemed to blast through her skeleton for an eternity. When it finally stopped, she looked around the door to see that the worm had uncoiled itself and had started thrashing around in the jar.
"Hoho! You’re not going to cause any trouble from inside there! That jar is quantum locked, so no phase-shift trickery today!" The Doctor, if she recalled what the Pegasus called him, took out some sort of wand with a light at the end of it and started waving it around the jar. "Now, we are not going to hurt you, we just need to find out why you are here... so, if you are as intelligent as I think you are, please tell us so we can help resolve it!"
She couldn't understand how a worm could possibly speak, but a noise was emitted from the Doctor's wand-like object. "Chhhkk... I... Cchhhhww... Hungry... Vrwwww...disturbance..."
"Ah, hold on, I've almost got the correct frequency..." She watched as the Doctor fiddled with his device before pointing it at the worm. "There we go! Try now!"
"I... Am... Grild..." So, she was finally going to get an answer to what was going on. "I... Eat... Rifts..."
"Ah! Name and a purpose! And rifts! Ha! What kind, if you would clarify please?"
"I...ride...rifts... I... Eat... Rifts... I... Felt... Large one... Forming..."
The Doctor looked at the Pegasus who was staring intently at the worm. She met his gaze and nodded. "So, you eat rifts? As in, dimensional rifts? As in, you ride a rift all the way through, eat it, and then go to the next one?"
"Yes..."
The Doctor put on a very large smile. "Derpy! Derpy! Do you know what we found?!" The Pegasus shook her head, declaring her answer to be a negative. "We found the multiverse's detrivore! Oh this is exciting!"
"Uhhh... detrivore, Doctor?" Luna was wondering that as well. She hadn't quite had the time yet to catch up on all the advances science had made.
"Oh, uh... detrivore! Decomposes dead materials! But our fried here-" he tapped the glass with a hoof. "Decomposes rifts between dimensions so icky stuff doesn't flood through! Bloody useful creature, isn't he?"
"So he gets rid of portals that could have really bad things could come through?"
"Absolutely! He is integral to keeping the foundations of every universe stable and keeping them from collapsing into each other!" He let out a breath. "Ha... When was the last time we met an alien that actually didn't want to kill us or take over some lesser, in their opinion, civilization?"
"Ummm... I don't think we have yet..."
"A first then!" Suddenly, the Doctor's smile turned into one of confusion. "But then, why did she bring me here if nothing was wrong?"
Luna felt even more confused now. Who was this she he went on about?
He turned to face the worm again. "Wait, why did you say you were here again?"
"Felt... Large... Rift... Largest... Ever... Felt..." The worm contorted in the glass, as if to show its delight at such a large meal.
"Oh, that is not good, not good at all..." He turned to face the contraption in the middle and fiddled around with it for a few seconds. "Derpy, these rifts... They aren't just one way. If one is big enough, it could swallow an entire city, into it, an entire country, even! If he is right, and there is a rift out there that is the largest he has ever felt in his life..."
"Then it could be really, really bad..."
"Yes, Derpy, it could be really bad." He twisted a knob and smacked a lever. "Now if only I could find it..."
"Not... Here... Yet..." The worm announced. "Soon... Very soon..."
The Doctor turned to face the creature surrounded in glass. "You have the ability to sense where rifts are going to be?! Fascinating..." He took out the wand once again and started to wave it in a circular fashion. "Can you give me a general location of where it will be so I can narrow my range?"
"... Up..."
"Up?" He tilted his head. "Up? Up... Up! Up." He turned to his assistant. "Derpy, what do you think of this?"
"Ummmm..." She sat down and placed a hoof under her chin. "Maybe he works like a compass? Maybe we can throw him outside and he will point us in the right direction!"
"Excellent idea, Derpy! Time to fire up the TARDIS and go on a little adventure!"
Luna was pretty sure the TARDIS was what he called his box, and assuming her guesswork was correct, he would disappear before she got the answers she wanted. She decided it was time to make an entrance.
"Halt! We wish for answers!" Luna called out in her best authoritative voice.
However, her entrance was cut short by a strange sound filling the air, the door closing behind her, and the entire structure suddenly going under a simulated earthquake.
Her hooves suddenly turned to jelly and she looked for the nearest hoofhold in order to keep her balance.
"Uhhh... Doctor?"
She heard Derpy call from across the room. "What is it Derpy?"
"I think we picked up a hitchhiker!" Luna assumed she meant her.
"A hitchhiker? What do you-" He looked over to the other mare in the room. "Well, hello Luna! How have you been doing? It's been a while since I have seen you!"
Now that the room had stopped shaking the life out of her, Luna got back on her hooves and proceeded to try to dust herself off in a regal manner. "We do not recall ever meeting one such as thou, Doctor. We were simply investigating a disturbance in our kitchen when we found thy box!"
"Oh, I see... We haven't met yet. Well, I suppose I should introduce myself once more!" He made a flourish with his hooves. "I am the Doctor! And this here-" he pointed over to the grinning mare at the opposite end of the console. "-Is my dear companion and assistant, Derpy Hooves! Say hello, Derpy!"
Derpy, still smiling, took a few seconds to comprehend the Doctor's words before rushing over to her. "Oh my gosh! Luna! It's been like..." She looked up. Or at least one of her eyes did. Now that Luna was closer, she could see her irises were displaced inside their sockets. "A month since the wigniscant invasion! But, I guess it hasn't happened to you yet... Oh wait! I still owe you half a muffin! Or do I owe future you half a muffin? Oh, I guess I owe you 14 and a half muffins now, but do I pay future you or now you?" She flipped upside-down in midair and tapped her chin. "This is confusing..."
"Now now, Derpy debts later, we have work to do!" He went over to a small toolbox under the console and started to fiddle around with the insides. "Alright Luna, how much did you listen in on and how much do I have to explain?"
Luna trotted over to the console and looked it over with a critical eye. "We understand that thou wishes to close some form of inter-dimensional rift with thy companion, but-"
Luna was cut off. "Ah, that's the Luna I know! Always gathering all the facts before making a judgment! Just the kind of mare that I trusted to lead NEURON."
"Neuron?"
He waved his hoof around while tossing seemingly random objects like a whisk and a computer circuit out. "Oh, you know, National Equestrian United Reconnaissance and Offensive Network. You know, the thing you set up to combat all kinds of threats, internal, external, alien?" He turned around to see Luna's perplexed expression. "I take it you haven't even thought about it yet? But you told me that you set it up two years ago..." A look of realization crossed his face. "Oooooh! Luna, you cheeky, cheeky princess, you..."
Luna was now very confused. She had assumed that this box had managed to work on some form of sorcery or rune work, but she could see nothing of the sort and both ponies in front of her were not unicorns. Who were they and what was going on, and why did he speak like they had met before?
"We demand answers, confusing brown one!" She stamped a hoof into the floor to show her indignation. "Who art thou and why dost thou knowest us?!"
The Doctor finally pulled his snout out of the tool box and lifted a contraption that looked like a mad scientist had taken different parts from a computer and some heart's warming decorations and glue them together. "Oh right, got to tell you, don't I? Well, short explanation is that I'm an alien that traveled here from another dimension that can travel all of time and space with my ship, called the TARDIS, stands for Time And Relative Dimensions In Space, by the way, with the goal of helping all sentient life throughout the cosmos!" He pushed a few buttons on the device in his hoof. "Long story is... Well, it’s a long story and I won't bore you with the details. Nopony-" He giggled slightly at some unknown joke. "-likes boring details. One exciting detail I will tell you though is that Derpy here decided to accompany me on my escapades and she has been an invaluable companion ever since!"
Derpy flipped in the air several times before landing and giving a bow. "Aww, that's really sweet! Thank you, Doctor!"
Luna was not sure if this pony was mad or telling the truth. Surprisingly, she was leaning more toward the truth, seeing as nopony would ever come up with such a convoluted story.
"... Very well. We accept thy explanation as fact, given current information presented." Luna decided to fire off another question. "So, thou hast been to the future? Describe to us the details, if thou willist, Doctor."
The Doctor looked up and tilted his head. "Nope. Not doing that. Spoilers and all. Too dangerous. But!" He waved the device over the container with the worm inside. "If you want, you can help us out. It's always great working with unicorns-" She heard and indignant "hey!" Come from the muffin thief. "And an alicorn will simply make the problems so much easier to solve. Plus, since I can travel time and space, we'll simply drop you off at the time you arrived back on board! What do you say?"
Luna was about to say no, but she thought about it. According to these ponies, there was to be some sort of disaster that could affect the entirety of equestria sometime in the near future. They, from what she could tell, had some experience in dealing with such matters and also had some clue as to what could possibly happen and how to stop it. Plus, she was one of the ruling diarchs of equestria, and thus had an obligation to protect it from any threats.
And she could finally escape that blasted castle and be out from under her overbearing sister's watchful eye for once.
"We have thought it over, and we have decided to accept they offer, if thou art indeed free of deceit."
A beeping was heard from the contraption and the Doctor rushed over to the black box attached to a metal arm on the console. "Excellent! Now, to fill you in on what I am currently doing-" he pulled a small, metallic tidbit from the side of the device and plugged it into a port on the table in front of him. "-I took some readings on Grild's natural rift locator and combined it with this device in order to triangulate the location of the rift, and hopefully its current size..."
He pushed another set of buttons, pulled a lever, punched a water noodle that popped up from the console, and then pushed a small red button on the black screen.
"And here we go!" The screen suddenly lit up, showing an image of a box, the same box she was currently in, sitting atop a cloud. "This is our current location..." He adjusted a few knobs on the screen, causing it to slowly back out and turn the current image into a black screen with yellow lines in a crisscross pattern, with bulges and dimples revealing objects that were hidden behind them.
The image kept backing up, farther and farther out, until it showed the entire planet, and even then it still kept going.
Finally, it stopped once the planet took up only half the screen, with a peculiar bulge taking up a much smaller portion at the opposite end. However, on that bulge were a scattering of tiny yellow dots, and Luna could swear that some of those dots were slowly growing in size.
"And here we are! Location confirmed!" The Doctor turned his head once he heard the ding telling him the screen had done it's work. "Oh... Oh... Oh dear, this is not good. Not good at all. This is very, very, very bad..."
The Pegasus glided over and pointed at the screen. "Uh, Doctor, is that what I think it is? And are those dots what I think they are?"
The Doctor pressed another couple of buttons and turned a few knobs and zoomed in on the object in question. The screen also disappeared, giving way to what Luna immediately recognized as her celestial body.
"That is our moon!" Luna also moved in closer to the screen, looking it over carefully. "What were those infernal yellow dots and why were they on our moon, Doctor?"
"Well, I'm afraid I have to inform you that what is left of your moon is most likely going to look like Swiss cheese..." The stallion pointed to a couple of peculiar spots that stood out ever so slightly because they seemed to be displaced from the surrounding area. "Those there are the dimensional rifts we are looking for..."
Luna quickly searched for her connection to the moon within her skull that kept it moving through the sky, but found it curiously gone. "Doctor! We hath lost our connection to the moon! How is it still within the sky?"
"Lost your connection? That shouldn't-" the brown stallion suddenly got a look on his face screaming realization. "Hold on, I used the TARDIS with you on board, but that shouldn't..." He trailed off on a tangent and started pacing along the catwalk. Luna, however, couldn't wait for him to finish his thoughts and instead decided she needed to take some action. Namely, reestablishing her connection to the moon so that she could perform her duty of moving it.
She opened the doors to the TARDIS and looked up, seeing that the moon did indeed still rest high in the sky. On closer examination, however, she realized that it was perfectly still, not moving at all, as if locked in place.
She took her magic and attempted to tether herself to the moon once more and found herself successful.
"Luna...? Luna! Luna, stop what you're doing right now!" Luna looked over her shoulder to see the Doctor yelling at her. "Cut it right now! If you don't-"
"Doctor, we believe we can try to affect our moon in what manner we please, so..." She pushed some magic into the connection, trying to get a better feel for the surface of the moon. "... If thou dost not mind, we will do as we must!"
"Luna, don't! I'm serious-" she blocked out what the stallion was saying and found one of the intrusive bubbles upon the surface of her fair moon. She poked at it with her magic, and determined that absorbing the energy out of it would be the best manner of ridding the offending thing, and so she started to absorb it.
Once she started the drain, however, she found that she could not stop, and quickly found herself overwhelmed with an abundance of energy.
Luna fell to the floor, clutching her head in pain, trying to cut the connection, but found that it simply would not stop.
"Derpy! Quick! She's undergoing a massive spike in energy! Close the doors and being her back to the console! We're going to do an emergency jump to cut the connection and drain the energy!"
In her pain, she felt somepony lift her from the floor and drag her body over to the console, a strange, cold device being attached to her horn. Upon its fastening, she felt her headache lessen, but she could still feel it climbing.
"Alright, time for an emergency jump!" Luna heard the Doctor flip a few switches and press a few buttons. "Don't let me down now, sexy!"
Her headache intensified, and soon she found herself whiting out from the pain.
"...Doctor? Doctor! I think she's waking up!"
Luna stirred from her rest. She didn't want to get up quite yet. It was nice, warm and comfortable on the bed she was sleeping on, so she kept her eyes closed and rolled over, pulling the blanket that had fallen off her shoulder over her head to block of the light and keep the heat in.
"Luna isn't much of a quick riser, from what I remember last time we found her napping on the job..."
Luna was much too tired to respond to such comments, but she did shift slightly to place her head under the pillow she had been resting on.
"Do you think it's a good idea to tell her she's sleeping in a bed we found on the surface of the moon?"
'Wait, what?' Luna thought. She instantly pulled herself from out of the sweet embrace of the bed and blearily looked around.
The white dust of her moon rested beneath her hooves. She was in one of the many craters decorating it, as she could barely make out the distant ridges of the walls where a meteor had caved in the surface of her current terrain. Behind her, she could see the seemingly random bed, the strange pair she had met within the blue box, and the box itself.
And then she looked up.
She really shouldn't have looked up. The planet certainly looked like her planet, with greens, whites, and blues representing lands, clouds and oceans, but there was one very key difference.
It was square.
A cube rested where a sphere should have been resting, revolving without a care in the world.
"Oh good! Good morning Luna! Or would that be good night? I am unsure how the day/night cycle works on the moon the way it is right now..." He trailed off. "Anyway, welcome to the moon! Isn't that exciting?"
Luna could only stare, as her thought processes had shut down to try and compare tend the scene before her.
She decided she did not want to deal with this today, so she decided to crawl back into bed and go back to sleep.
"So, Doctor, how long do you think we'll have to wait this time before she wakes up?"
"... I don't know..."