//------------------------------// // Chapter One // Story: Next Tuesday Morning // by Flutterdude //------------------------------// Twilight slowly came to. Consciousness came in bits and pieces, at one point being able to see, but not move much more than her eyes. (And her eye lids. Can't forget the eye lids.) Stuck in place by her own immobility, she observed the library around her. The explosion had not been kind to it, littering the pale pink floor with all sorts of books, the lightly-charred spot where future Twilight had been some hours before now indiscernible from the rest of the lightly-charred wooden floor. Actually, nevermind "some hours". The Sun got into Twilight's eyes if she leaned enough to her right from her position laying on the south stairwell. It was supposed to be behind her. She had been unconscious all night. Maybe even more than twenty-four hours. But Twilight decided to assume she had only spent one night unconscious. She squinted, and leaned back to a position where the Sun wasn't in her eyes. She looked out the window she had crashed through. Her eyes felt heavy as she observed that the street was battered, in generally horrid shape, and empty. News papers blew across the dirt road to definitively signify that the street was, in fact, empty. The air had a perverse, weird quality to it as well. She noticed the vaporous caliginosity of the air around her and everything else. It seemed... dark. As if all of Ponyville was under a very scarce shroud of sorts. It was then that she noticed the entire sky had a pink tint to it. The only sounds she heard were the wind blowing the faint streams of shadowy mist through the dank air, and the general sounds of nature: birds; squirrels; more birds. She noticed a funny sparkling surrounding her. At first she thought she was seeing stars, but these were pink, glittering specks of magical energy that flickered on and off like willow-the-wisps, the result of using an overloaded combat spell. Inside the vaguely-defined boundaries of the shimmering glitter, there were no contrails of the strange shadowy vapor. After a few hours, the sparkles were almost gone, as were the unsettling wafts of shadow. She summoned the strength to stand up on all four hooves. Most of the strain was due to being unconscious for at least twelve hours rather than real weakness. As she got her legs back in order, she trotted into the doorway of the library. A bizarre sense of emptiness seemed to impregnate the atmosphere around all that was visible. More news papers feebly tumbled about on the ground. With a sigh, she went back into the library. The sparkling glitter was now nothing more than the occasional flicker in Twilight's eye. It was very scarce and would be gone in a matter of minutes. She walked up the north stairwell, noting the cracks in the wooden steps. Lightly-charred wooden steps. The cracks in the walls. Cracks in the ceiling. The second floor at the top of the stairs. The windows looking out to a town devoid of visible ponies. The mirror. She looked into the mirror and was left staring at a mess of a pony. Her mane was unkempt and spiky, rather reminiscent of the main character of Metal Gear Sparkle, Sparkle Snake. Rather reminiscent of future Twilight. She realized with a stilted, panicked sigh that Cerberus was no doubt the horrible thing future commando metal-head Sparkle Snake punk rocker Twilight from the future had tried to warn her about. She reassured herself that she was still missing the eye patch. And the jumpsuit. "No eye patch," she said to nopony in particular. "No jumpsuit. No..." She turned her head to the side and noticed the scar on her cheek. I must’ve gotten it from the window, no doubt. "Okay, I have the scar. But still no bandanna." A dull head ache began to take shots at her brain. She clutched her forehead with her hoof, even though that never really works. She looked back at the mirror to find that her mane was in her eyes. She blew at it, but that only helped for about one second. Without thinking of the implements of what she was doing, she grabbed some cloth from a nearby first aid kit and wrapped it around her forehead to keep her mane up. It helped a bit with the head ache, too. She realized what had just happened, closed her eyes and corrected her previous statement. "Okay, I have the bandanna. But no jumpsuit and no eye patch." She thought about how long she had until the prophecy was proven, before it finally did become NEXT TUESDAY MORNING, and remembered that she wasn't certain just how long she had been out. She sighed and trotted down the stairs. As she looked about the empty lobby, she thought to herself that she also hadn't seen Spike anywhere. A green-spiked purple baby dragon with horrible glowing shadowy eyes (wherein light was replaced with shadowy ultraviolet-type stuff... or something) lunged at her from the railing of the top storey. --------------- Twilight was on the side of the street opposite the library when she stopped her galloping to turn around. Standing in the doorway of the library was Spike. He was lurched over in a predatory pose, arms raised to his chest, tongue flicking in between razor-sharp teeth, darkly glowing eyes staring back in her general direction. Twilight's eyes began to relax. Her heart pumped madly in her chest. She had a hard time believing the thing that had just attacked her in an unprovoked animalistic fury was Spike. Or, at least, it was Spike's body being possessed by Cerberus's dark energy stuff. That was a bit more believable. She remembered the one time where she was with her five friends in the Everfree Forest, where strange shadowy vapor animated a hammock of trees to give them scary faces. She assumed this was the same basic principle on steroids. Her five friends. Applejack, Pinkie Pie, Rainbow Dash, Fluttershy, and Rarity. She wondered how much that number had decreased as she ran down the street toward the Carousel Boutique, Rarity's version of Twilight's library, taking heavy breaths from both fatigue and frightened shock. --------------- The gallop to the Carousel Boutique was uneventful as far as actual events went. Nothing at all had happened. News papers had blown in the wind like they always do whenever stuff like this happens, but nopony was out taking a walk, or looking for food, or anything. Rather, Twilight had spent it wondering what was happening around her. Her brother/adopted son/slave and servant had been possessed by a strange ethereal power and turned into something like a zombie. She remembered a movie she had seen once with her friends in an open-air cinema. She forgot what it was called, but that wasn't important. She burst into the Carousel Boutique hoping that Rarity was still alive, still Rarity, like Twilight was herself still. She thought about that while idly walking to the middle of the main room. She was a survivor. She walked up the stairs and noted that this time, there were no cracks. No cracks in the steps. The walls. The ceiling. The door to Rarity's room. Everything was in tip-top shape. It was just that there was nopony anywhere to be seen. Nowhere. And judging from Spike's condition, the whole town, maybe even the whole world, had possibly become nothing but a bunch of zombie-like cretins. She had only avoided the same fate because she had been surrounded by the after-effects of her own magic. Unless somepony else had released a massive discharge of energy when the black stuff came over their area, she could very well have been the only pony worthy of being called a "survivor". She hoped that wasn't the case as she opened the door to Rarity's room. A light blue-green-colored unicorn with a short, Rainbow Dash-like mane of sky blue streaked with white was standing in the corner of the room, her tail to Twilight. Her head was slouched over something, bobbing up and down. Twilight tried a simple "Excuse me?" The unicorn looked back at Twilight with darkly glowing eyes. Twilight screamed as the possessed pony galloped surprisingly fast toward her. The purple one grabbed a balsa hat rack with her levitation magic and put all her effort into making sure wood met head. It did. The hat rack wasn't exactly a crowbar, and shattered into pieces upon striking the uppugnant seafoam pony. Twilight was planning what to do next as the zombie-like pony rose to its hooves and regained its feral, crouching composure. As it opened its mouth and dashed toward her, Twilight desperately grabbed the unicorn by the neck and held it back. She did the first thing to come to her mind and heaved it through a window. As it careened through the glass and down two storeys to the ground, Twilight got a glimpse of its cutie mark: A golden lyre. She knew this pony. Not terribly well, but her name was Lyra Heartstrings. She came into the library quite a few times. She would always get nonfiction bipedal anatomy books. Her girlfriend Bon-Bon was a bit more diverse in her catalog. And Twilight had just thrown her through a window. Twilight tried to bury that thought, correcting herself by repeating the thought in her head that the monster she had just thrown out of a window was not Lyra. She knew this was true, but this development with the possessed and the zombie apocalypse and what-not was all so sudden, it had thrown her off guard. She stood in a panicked stupor in the middle of Rarity’s private quarters, looking around her, trying to get her thoughts together. In the corner where she had found the possessed Lyra, there was a badly-damaged corpse. Rarity's corpse. Twilight screamed a bit louder this time, as if trying to find out if windows could break twice. They can't. She averted her eyes from her friend's body and walked up to the broken window. She tried to think as coherently as possible. She figured that since Rarity's body was bleeding and all her internal organs were in the right places (Twilight had read too many anatomy books to not be able to judge that), she had not been turned into a possessed freak of nature. She had instead been killed by one. Twilight looked down the window out of bile curiosity and saw possessed Lyra's lifeless body two storeys down. It was bleeding profusely. Twilight had expected some sort of coagulated ichor. She also had half-expected the zombie to get back up and simply shrug off fall damage. But no. The body of Lyra Heartstrings looked like any other dead body. Twilight quickly dug her head into the desk she was craning her neck over, beginning to tear up, her emotions and tortured surprise at everything Ponyville had become since she went unconscious finally sinking in and getting the better of her. She rose her head and looked blankly into space with pupils the size of a pin head. Again, she attempted to collect her thoughts, biting her lip as she thought about how incredibly normal the bloody corpse of Lyra Heartstrings was. Apparently these "possessed" weren't necessarily undead. Just taken over. Which meant that they functioned just like a normal pony. Except they were brain-dead zombified shells of their former selves that seemed to do nothing but be a nuisance all the time and served no purpose but to scare the living crap out of everypony. Twilight noticed a note on the desk she was slouching over. She moved the giant picture of a clef note out of the way to find a blue diary, opened to a final entry just over halfway through the pages. The horn writing was clearly Rarity's. Neat, very tidy, with little hearts over the Is. If it were printed in typeset, it would be in italics. Dear Diary and whoever else may be reading this, I have no clue what just happened. My dear friend Twilight Sparkle had tried to subdue the monstrous beast Cerberus, but to no avail. She ended up blowing up the whole block and possibly killing herself. I never did get a good look at it, as I galloped as fast as I could to my house, where this note should be lying. A bizarre black fog began consuming the whole town, and it was impending upon my street. So I locked up all of the entrances as fast and best as I could and hoped that whatever horrible thing the black fog was sure to cast upon us would not affect me. I stayed all night last night holed up in my room, nothing but blackness outside my window. Now that it is morning, the blackness has receded somewhat, but there are many questions not yet answered. I doubt they ever will be answered, judging by the utter dankness of the whole world in front of me. I see sunken-eyed shells of what used to be ponies I knew, and I wonder if I'll ever be able to trot outside my house again safely. I see the sky tinted in pink, and I wonder if this fate has befallen the whole world. I see newspapers blowing across the streets, and I wonder why they always do that when stuff like this happens. I wonder if my little sister Sweetie Belle is alright. I wonder if my friends are dead. If the world is doomed. If I am going to be killed by one of these possessed abominations I see outside my window, roaming the streets, seeming to have no purpose in nature but to scare the living crap out of me. If there is hope for civilisation yet. Now I just sit here, mulling over what to do, wondering if it's safe to go outside, or if it ever will be, and silently hoping that this can all be reversed somehow, however often the laws of time and space cruelly remind me that this isn't possible. And I really want to go to the spa. If you are able to make things right again, please do so. Please make things right again. Twilight put the log down slowly, trying to look at the world through her friend's eyes. She wondered the same things her friend had. If the world ever would be right again, if there somehow was hope in this seemingly hopeless land. Her thoughts were a bit clearer now. She floated up the very pencil her late friend had used to write her last entry, erased the word "civilisation", replaced it with "civilization", and left. She came back into the room and erased "civilization", wrote it again with little hearts over the Is, and left. -------------- As she stood in the main room of the Carousel Boutique and savored the calm stability of the empty lobby, Twilight thought over what could be done, remembering the words of future Twilight, who had clearly wanted to tell her(self) how to prevent this whole thing from ever happening. She cursed herself as the fact sunk in that if it wasn't for her endless questions and interruptions, none of this would have ever happened. Rarity would still be alive. Spike and Lyra would still be normal. Those annoying news papers would stop crawling across the unpaven streets. Her mane would still be nice and clean-cut. Future Twilight had mentioned a "Star Swirl the Bearded wing" in the Canterlot Archives. She had said that the time travel spell she had been using was located there. Present Twilight decided then and there that she would drop everything she was doing, go to the Canterlot Archives at whatever cost lesser than death, and be sure to make her past self shut her trap long enough for her to tell her past self to not... To not what? What could she do or not do that would prevent this from happening? What exactly was it that her future self was trying to specifically warn her about? She thought about this, and suddenly, rather mundanely remembered that Fluttershy had wanted to do something before Twilight had gone into gung-ho hero mode and allowed Ponyville to become a zombified hell hole in the process. She couldn't think of any better of a plan, so she decided to go with that. It was stupid, but then, the entire past day or so had been stupid. That is, if it was just a day. She noticed a solar calendar apparatus near a window to her left. Twilight had read extensively about these, and with some thinking discerned the date to be Saturday, March 10th. NEXT TUESDAY MORNING was in about three or four days, counting that day, which was now in its noon hours. The future Twilight who had tried to prevent all of this from happening was from just a few days in the future. If the fictional laws of time were anything to trust, she would be in Canterlot by then, somehow. She would probably have to get moving right then in order to get to Canterlot on foot. She puffed her chest and and took conscious, deep breaths, trying to forget all of the emotional torment she had gone through that day, and trying to not think about all of the emotional torment she could very well go through on the way to Canterlot. As she looked out of the doorway and into the street, empty except for a stray tumbling news paper, her thoughts now concise, she remembered that night past, sitting with her five closest friends in the outdoor cinema, eating popcorn, resting her forehoof on a cowering Fluttershy and softly reciting familiar reassurances with a reserved chuckle, and the name of the movie they had been watching. 28 Cycles Later.