The night sky over Equestria is widely regarded as absolutely marvelous, marred only slightly by the massive prevalence of stars throughout it. On this particular night, the moon loomed smugly over Ponyville, throwing down its stolen light as if it owned the place. Most ponies had given up on sucking any enjoyment out of the night long ago after the realization hit that the stars just weren’t going away, and Ponyville’s streets tend to be deserted after dark as a result. One pony, however, was still working hard at catching a glimpse of the beautiful void just beyond the reach of those horrible balls of gas.
“Blasted stars! Why must they move so often?”
Twilight fiddled with her telescope a bit. After a few more fruitless attempts at some decent nightgazing she decided to call it a day and yelled out at Spike to bring her telescope case to the balcony.
“Sure thing, Twilight!” called Rainbow Dash in reply.
Twilight blinked. She blinked again, but after much effort was able to overcome the urge to blink a third time. She briefly wondered if she was being pranked, but decided to think nothing of it and set about dismantling her telescope. Eventually, the sound of hooves echoing on the stairwell announced that her case was coming.
“Here ya go, Twi.” Rarity’s voice, this time.
The librarian smirked at whatever trick was being pulled on her and turned to face her friend. Her eyes were surprised to find that it was Fluttershy who stood in the doorway, and, angry with her brain for tricking them like that, opened painfully wide as punishment. Fluttershy, unaware of the bitter conflict currently taking place between Twilight’s organs, gave a serene smile and levitated the telescope case over to the dumbfounded mare. Twilight’s eyes caught the dull yellow glow of Fluttershy’s magic and decided that maybe they could give her brain a break. She found her gaze rising towards the night sky. The moon gave her a wink. Her eyes quickly fell back to ground level in time to catch Spike carefully withdrawing the telescope case and attempting to contort his face into a confused expression. It was slow going.
“You alright, Twilight?” he asked, right eyebrow moving upwards at a snail’s pace. Somehow his words had come out perfectly despite his mouth ever-so-slowly trying to curl into a concerned frown as he spoke.
“I-I’m fine, Spike. Long night, I guess.” replied Twilight as she looked out over Ponyville. “I’ll feel better after I get a good night’s re-“
She paused. A changeling had just walked right out in front of her house. A changeling! In plain sight! Twilight’s mind latched onto this new information, her inner detective giggling madly. She excitedly turned back to face Spike and was relieved to find that he was still Spike. His face took this time to finally hit its maximum confusion level and almost instantaneously snapped back to normal. Twilight’s inner detective remembered the apparent prank from earlier and filed it under “Changeling Conspiracy!” as well as “Possible Mental Degradation.”
“Actually, Spike, I think I’m feeling better already! Come on, let’s go find the girls, the night is still young!”
Spike scarcely had time to point out that it was four in the morning before Twilight was out the door.
------
Twilight had lived in Ponyville for some time, although she couldn’t quite remember how long. As a result, she was fairly positive that she knew the habits of the town. Everypony waltzing outside for a lovely nighttime walk as soon as she exited the library was not typical Ponyvillian behavior. Of course, ponies and buildings switching places while one wasn't looking was not typical Ponyvillian behavior either, a fact which caused Twilight no end of neck pains. She was starting to get whiplash after swinging her head from side to side for so long, desperately searching for a constant. There was Spike, of course, but he was too busy growing flippers out of his lower jaw for Twilight to bother with him. A pink, blurry object bounced in front of Twilight and stopped, preventing her from moving any further. The motionless blur made to ask why Twilight was doing the Pendulum sideways, but was distracted by its front hooves elongating three feet and twisting themselves into a pretzel shape. The blur gasped and promptly excused itself on an important errand to the Everfree.
After what felt like an eternity but was probably longer, Sugarcube Corner rolled into view in front of Twilight. The idea that she had been heading in the direction of Carousel Boutique entered into Twilight’s mind briefly but was politely escorted out before it could cause any havoc. The bakery crushed a few houses before leaping into the air and coming to a stop a few feet in front of her and a few yards above her. The moon, which had been following Twilight’s path up to this point, got absolutely giddy over this event. Twilight aggressively ignored the figure eights it started making in the sky in favor of teleporting into the Corner. Spike, who had been entranced by the moon’s antics, was sorely disappointed to find that the wonderful lunar dance had been replaced by the infinite void between planes that Twilight traveled to when she used her teleportation spell. One of the limbs extending from his jaw globbered about in disappointment before leaping from his hat and into the abyss.
Twilight returned to her plane of existence with a soft “poof” and a loud “zap.” These conflicting sounds never ceased to give her a minor headache, but she liked using the spell as it offered a wonderful view of the inky blackness beyond her universe. Her friends found this hobby rather off-putting but never said anything lest the Tolerance Police beat them with their loving batons. Luckily, the Tolerance Police had a tendency to ignore petty arguments, and Twilight’s friends were taking full advantage of this fact. Applejack was violently spewing out some nonsense about the importance of handbags when going on a long journey. Rainbow Dash, who had been floating upside-down during her friend’s tirade, returned to a standing position on the ceiling and fired off a rebuttal in the form of a well-rehearsed essay on the necessity of suitcases. Her words hit Applejack like a sack of bricks, sending the orange mare flying into a nearby wall (which, due to the sideways nature of the building, was technically the floor). Meanwhile, Rarity was desperately trying to get Fluttershy to understand that wearing clothes wasn’t lame at all. She became steadily more aggravated as she realized that Fluttershy’s only riposte was staring intensely at a nearby pastry and mumbling swear words. Pinkie, who was without anypony to argue with in Twilight’s absence, had struck up a heated debate with her reflection, which was winning easily.
“Girls, girls!” cried Twilight, carefully dodging a particularly powerful word barrage from Rainbow Dash. “Please, quit arguing, I have some very important news. There’s a Changeling attempting to infiltrate Ponyville!”
None of the other ponies responded. Applejack’s voice had been knocked clean out of her by Dash’s tirade and, without a body to defend it, was getting quite the beatdown by Rainbow Dash. Fluttershy had cursed up quite a storm, and the subsequent thunder and lightning surrounding the poor cupcake made it difficult for her to hear Twilight anyway. Pinkie Pie’s reflection had won her debate and walked off, leaving Pinkie herself staring glassy-eyed into space while being completely unable to move. Rarity, completely ignored for the first time in her life, emitted a trembling “not again” before disappearing completely, a loud “pop” sounding as the surrounding air rushed to fill the vacuum she left behind.
Twilight gave an exasperated sigh and prepared to cast a forbidden silence spell. Silence spells had been banned millennia ago by early incarnations of the Friendship Police on the grounds that, without spoken words, proper communication and friendship could not occur. While the Friendship Police had officially changed their stance after the Deaf/Mute Riots left Old Ponyville in ruins, many modern lawbringers still carried old grudges against the stigmatized incantations. Twilight didn’t care about keeping the corrupt police force happy, though. She just wanted her friends to shut up. Luckily for her, however, she was stopped just short of casting the spell by a calm, regal voice.
“Hey purple horse thing, what are you doing?”
Twilight was so scared she jumped out of her skin. By the time she landed with a sickening squelch as her muscles hit the ground, her hide had crumpled neatly to the floor and the God-Princess of Equestria had appeared before her, hair flowing majestically in the wind blowing inside the building.
“Hahaha, dude, what? That’s disgusting, put some clothes on,” said the beautiful leader of Equestria. “Actually wait, hold on, haha, h-hold on, my sister’s gotta see this.”
In the blink of an eye, Sugarcube Corner disappeared and was replaced by the main hall of the castle in Canterlot. Twilight, of course, had no eyelids with which to blink, but she still recognized the transition as very quick. Princess Celestia meandered off towards one of the stained glass windows and, after a brief pause, guffawed loudly in the direction of a small image of a pony on the window pane. She then gossiped with the image in hushed tones, occasionally glancing at Twilight out of the corner of her eye and bursting into hearty laughter. The stained glass pony, for its part, remained unamused.
Meanwhile, Twilight was attempting to gather her skin into a pony-shaped form for slipping into, a task made infinitely harder by the lack of said skin as well as her scrawny librarian muscles. After the better part of half on hour spent listening to Celestia’s guffaws and the stained glass pony’s judging silence, Twilight remembered that she was in possession of a magical horn capable of breaking the laws of the space-time continuum. She had no idea what said horn looked like without skin surrounding it, but she knew instinctively that her foalhood fantasies of the horn being an erogenous zone would vanish forever if she tried to find out. Shuddering at the thought of such an important part of her foalhood being made to sound ridiculous, Twilight cast a levitation spell and lifted her skin into the air before stepping into it, allowing herself to be enveloped in her own furry coat before screaming as a small platoon of ants crawled out of her tear ducts. Celestia let out her loudest laugh yet, her master plan of teleporting Twilight’s skin onto an ant bed finally coming to fruition. Unfortunately, Twilight’s piercing shriek caused the window on her stained glass partner resided to fracture and explode.
Celestia twitched. She twitched again. She twitched a fourth, fifth, and sixth time before her head twitched so violently that her tiara flew clean off. Several miles away, in Sugarcube Corner, the fine piece of headwear smashed into Pinkie Pie’s mirror, obliterating it and startling Pinkie into movement. Finally freed from her reflection, she wandered across the room and wondered to herself why a group of gaping black holes had appeared where her friends used to be. She wondered and wondered until the black holes, recognizing her, all ran towards her at once to envelop her in an approved Friendship Hug. As her body approached each of her friend’s respective event horizons, it was ripped apart, sucked into the negative space formerly occupied by the other Elements of Harmony. Her atoms dispersed across a thousand different alternate universes, ensuring they could never again form a single whole.
Princess Celestia was unaware of this, but, had she known, she certainly would have been able to relate as her head twitched at such a high velocity that her face split apart at the center. Both the Princess and Twilight were even more surprised as a decidedly not twitching Luna emerged from the hole in Celestia’s face and stepped gracefully into the room.
“Twilight,” said Luna.
“What,” said Twilight.
“H-h-h-h-h-h-a-a-a-a-a-r-r-r-r-p-p-p-p-y-y-y!” twitched Celestia.
“I’m glad you noticed the Changeling I sent, young one. It was the only signal I could send from within my prison,” said Luna.
“What,” said Twilight.
At this point, what remained of Celestia’s body was spastically flailing across the room, breaking everything it came in contact with. The castle gave off an alarming rumbling noise. Needless to say, Twilight was sufficiently alarmed.
“What’s happening? Why is the castle falling apart? How did you just walk out of the Princess like that?” Twilight sputtered, only stopping when a buttress landed mere feet from her position. Luna was unperturbed.
“There is no time to explain, Twilight. I will attempt to tell you more once this infernal night is finished. For now, we must get you out of here,” said Princess Luna.
Before Twilight could protest, ask yet another question, or even blink her newly-lidded eyes, she found her surroundings changed once again. There was no longer ground beneath her feet, walls surrounding her. She floated in the open air, a great expanse of land laid out thousands of feet below her. For a split second Twilight was able to gaze into the distance and admire the darkness of the night, the wide expanses of nothingness taking over Ponyville, even the stars that had bothered her so much earlier. She smiled.
Then the split second was over, the wind rushed into her ears, and Twilight fell.