April 9, 2027
Baltimare – The Hungry Ursa
Friday Evening
Quantum sat on the end of a hard mattress, staring out the window of a place that resembled a trashy motel room. Deep green walls made the bathroom door seem even closer, and the gaudy furniture was littered with old lottery tickets, raffle stubs, and a few classic novels that looked like they had never been read. The room smelled strongly of a low-end stallion musk cologne. The drab greyness of the street below was broken up only by colorful spring buds from the few trees that had been strategically planted along the sidewalks. Having lived in Baltimare for many years of her life, she recognized the city immediately and knew all of this was just a vain effort at ‘beautification’; the trees were often infused with life magic just to keep them going in the face of all the smog.
On the street below, she watched ponies drearily going about their daily lives by the light of the setting sun. A pink mare with a kerchief around her flattened mane was corralling some foals safely away from the street. A school wagon, long finished with its rounds, was lumbering slowly back to its home for the night. A few ne’er-do-well colts wearing hoodies were kicking a ball around and generally loitering. Quantum saw them all, yet barely noticed any of them. She was waiting for a familiar, cyan-blue mare to emerge from The Hungry Ursa and head home. Had she just missed her? Surely Trixie would be heading home by now – she was always home in time to make dinner.
Sighing deeply, the minty mare slumped her shoulders. She’d always come home from school with the expectation that dinner would be there, and couldn’t recall a time when she’d given a thought to what her mother must have gone through just to put it on the table every night. And she’d never seen Trixie wear such a ridiculous getup. The very thought of it all was like a blast of dragon fire to the kindling of her pride. How could she not have known?
Quantum’s reflection was broken by the sound of a hooftap at the door. She got up and clopped halfway across the room before she took note of the bathtowel she’d left folded neatly on the bed – it reminded her that she still reeked of turnip rum, and was in need of a shower. The thought of answering the door smelling like cheap booze made her hesitate, and for a moment she just stood there, hoping whoever it was would just go away.
Knock knock knock
No such luck. The minty mare-turned-stallion sighed, completed her trek across the tiny room, and opened the door with a magical nudge from her horn. In the hallway stood a forest green pegasus mare with a lavender mane, long eyelashes, and an outfit very similar to what Quantum saw her mother wearing downstairs. She was wearing eyeshadow to match her mane color, and sported a cutie mark of a pink heart with a white picket fence around it on her flank. The mare flexed her wings, batted her lashes over her vermillion eyes, and smiled warmly.
“Hi pony,” she cooed, “are you gonna let me in, or just stand in the doorway gawking all night long?”
“Uh, oh—uh,” Stupidly Quantum stepped aside, and the mare sauntered in on her heels, kicking them off the moment she crossed the threshold. As Quantum let the door shut, the mare raised herself from the carpet and flitted over to the bed, where she sat rubbing her rear hooves with her front ones.
“Tch,” she breathed, “If we were meant to wear shoes like that we’d all have been born with spikes on the backs of our hooves. But you know how it is. This is a unicorn hangout,” she looked up, eyeing Quantum, “and you ‘horn’ stallions don’t like your mares floating around the room all the time.”
Quantum just nodded, cocking her head to the side quizzically at the newcomer who seemed to have no qualms about making herself right at home in Draw’s room. When the mare looked up and noticed Quantum had neither moved nor spoke, she patted the bed beside her and smiled warmly.
“Sit with me, sweetie?”
Quantum hesitated. The mare’s expression faltered.
“What’s the matter, Draw? I don’t bite,” she grinned, “Well, not unless you want me to, that is. I heard about the pot you lost today. That was a pretty good-sized pile of bits. Not like you at all, but I guess nopony can have your kind of luck all the time.”
“R-right,” Quantum laughed, rubbing the back of her neck sheepishly. Cautiously she approached the bed. At the green mare’s behest, she sat down on the very edge and glanced down into her own lap.
The pegasus frowned and patted the same spot as before. “I could fit three fat griffons in the distance between you and me. That’s not like you either.” She paused, sighing, “This is about Twiggy, isn’t it.”
“T-Twiggy?” Quantum could barely bring herself to utter that sultry pseudonym for her mother. “O-of course not? I mean, no, of course not! Why would you, um…think there was something going on with me and my own moth—Twiggy?”
The mare sat up straight and folded her forelegs. “Drop the act. Swizzle told me what happened. She said, ‘Cozy Hearth, you won’t believe who your stallion was trying to pick up today!’”
With much ado, Quantum slipped and promptly fell off the end of the bed, landing hard on her rump. She sputtered, rubbing her stinging backside, “What!? I wasn’t trying to pick mo-Twiggy up! Where the heck did anypony get that idea!? I just wanted to…uh…help her clean up!”
Cozy Hearth, the forest green pegasus mare, giggled merrily at her companion’s exasperation. She spread her wings and glided gracefully down from the bed to perch upon ‘Draw’, pinning ‘him’ to the carpeted floor. She huffed out a breath that was so close, Quantum could feel its warmth pass over her muzzle.
“I knew it was a misunderstanding the moment I heard it.”
With that, Cozy nuzzled Quantum’s cheek, and promptly planted a single, light kiss on the end of the minty mare’s snout. Going cross-eyed from the closeness, Quantum kicked her way out from under the pegasus and scooted along the floor on her rump until her back came up against a bookshelf. Wide-eyed and stiff shouldered, she glanced around for an escape route while Cozy closed the distance at a crawl, a sly grin on her face.
“Is it because you smell?” Her voice tinkled along the air to Quantum’s ears, “It wouldn’t be the first time you came home smelling like the whole first floor does anyway.” Flicking her wing out sharply, she caught the towel on the bed and sent it expertly sailing through the air until it landed in a heap just in front of the minty mare, “Besides, all it means is that I’m just in time for your bath. You want to get all nice and clean, don’t you?”
Cozy slithered over the towel and picked it up in her teeth. Sliding closer to her beau, she batted her wings in such a way that great gouts of her elegant perfume were packed tightly into Quantum’s nostrils. When the two were nearly nose to nose, Cozy paused, as if waiting for Quantum to do something.
Quantum did do something. She levitated the towel over Cozy’s eyes like a shield and scrambled up, putting a few hooves of distance between the two ponies before the green mare could shrug the towel off.
This time, Cozy Hearth’s frown lacked any playful edges. “Pony, what’s wrong? You can tell your Cozy all about it. Is it because you lost that hand?” The pegasus turned around and sat up, concern in her eyes. “Sweetie, I know a stallion has his pride, but it’s gonna happen now and then. Tilt is an idiot. He’ll come back tomorrow, all smug and sure of himself, and you’ll burn him down to his tail like you always do, and get your money back. I can wait until then.”
Wait? Quantum thought, wait for what? Just as soon as the question entered Quantum’s mind, she came up with an answer. Of course. It was so obvious. Clopping over to the nightstand, she slid the drawer open and came upon a bag she’d found shortly after being introduced to the room, that was laden with bits. Drawing out an ample supply, she levitated them over to the bookshelf and sat them in a pile right next to the pegasus mare’s head. She grinned, satisfied with herself. “Why wait? I can pay you right now!”
Cozy glanced at the pile of bits, noting the amount of them…and scowled. With a flourish, she batted the entire pile off the shelf, scattering the money all over the floor. “I don’t need your charity, Draw! And do you think I came up here tonight just to collect my fee so blatantly? How vulgar!” In a huff, she drew herself to her hooves and tossed the towel in Quantum’s face. “There’s a reason I keep a room for myself, even if I don’t use it much. I guess tonight is one of those times where it will come in handy. Goodnight!” With that, the petite, deceptively fragile-looking green flower of a mare stamped out of the room, slamming the door behind her. Quantum heard a clapping noise before she could get the towel off her face.
“Two towels in the face from two different mares in the same day,” came a familiar voice, “You’re batting a thousand. Gigolos everywhere would be proud.”
Quantum cast the towel back onto the bed and glowered at the pudgy, gaudy, toasty orange form of Hal, who was reclining on the windowsill. “My tail doesn’t swing that way,” she protested, “and you realize you could have just clopped in on me in the shower, right?”
Hal smirked. “What is it with mares and the bathroom? You’d look exactly the same in there, only wet. And don’t forget – you’re wearing a stallion’s tail today, and the one you have on most definitely does swing that way. Head and hooves in the game, remember? You don’t have to bed ‘em, but at least try to act interested. Besides,” Hal commented wryly, “how would you even know anything about tail swinging? I never saw you clop around campus with a stallion or a mare on your leg.”
Quantum blushed deeply. “I…I had research to do. So did you.”
Hal just shook his head, “I at least went to parties now and then. There’s more to life than just studying all the time.”
“Hal,” Quantum sighed with a mixture of embarrassment and annoyance, “what am I doing here? Is something going to happen to my mother?” As soon as the words came out of her mouth, she was already heading for the door.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“My house, duh,” Quantum shot back. “I have to find my mother and figure out how I’m going to save her from…all of this, and that disgusting ‘Tilt’ character. He’s obviously lording something over her. She’d never reduce herself to using a pet name and hanging out with a slug like that in a seedy dive like this.”
“Sit your stubborn backside down,” Hal ordered. “You’re not doing anything of the sort.”
“Hal,” Quantum practically growled, “I know what everypony thinks of my mother, but she’s the only family I’ve got, and I’m going to help her if I can. Don’t get in my way.”
Hal shook his frosted mane, whipped out his control device, and started booping away. “That’s not what I mean. First of all, you sat through elementary temporal theory the same as I did, and you know as well as I do that meeting a previous version of yourself could cause a paradox that might potentially rip a hole in the space time continuum. In this timeline, you’re thirteen years old and you’re most definitely home from school right now, so going to your house is probably, I dunno, the worst possible idea? Secondly,” Hal paused to beep again, “Tissy doesn’t have any readings on your mother.”
Quantum blinked, “So?”
“So,” Hal replied with no small amount of sarcasm, “if you’d let me finish I’ll explain why that’s significant. Tissy did some more tests and was able to determine that your actions aren’t likely to have any significant effect on the lives of ponies that have no variable causality readings. Swizzle isn’t showing any readings either. Neither are Hole Card, Short Stack, or Slow Play. It means that if you’re going to do some good in the here and now, you need to focus either on Draw Out, Tilt, or possibly that mare that was just in here, Cozy Hearth.” Hal paused to beep again, “By the way, she’s twenty-three years old, mother of six, and is so full-time here she doesn’t go home much. No local family, but she has a special deal with an older couple that run a daycare. Almost all her money goes to her kids and her rent.”
“Six foals?” Quantum asked.
“Three foals, two colts, one filly…no twins,” Hal replied.
Quantum stared at the door, suddenly feeling remorseful. “But you said she’s only twenty-three…”
Hal looked up from his device. He wasn’t smiling. “Cutie, life isn’t all about staring at the stars, rubbing hooves with princesses, and going to college. Some ponies don’t get all the breaks.” He glanced back at his screen, “Cozy Hearth was disowned by her family in Manehatten for getting pregnant when she was seventeen. She didn’t graduate from school and has no credentials to get a decent job, so all she has to make money off of is her pretty face. As far as Tissy can tell, Cozy did whatever was necessary to keep her clients. Cozy’s damn lucky somepony was willing to help her out, or else her young ones would be living in this building with her.
Quantum was looking in the mirror at her alter ego; considering his dashing features. She had to admit, he was a handsome stallion. “Are any of the kids…Draw’s?”
Hal booped, “Twenty-eight point nine percent chance. There are also a laundry list of other names on here that have percentage chances listed, but Cozy apparently spends most of her nights with Draw. Tissy’s running a few more causality strings on her right now, to see if there’s anything nasty coming up in her future.”
Quantum perked up, “Hey, this should be no problem, right?” She smiled, glancing back at her companion eagerly, “She needs money, right? Draw has lots of bits. If I just give her some—”
“Woah, pony,” Hal flicked a wing and held up a hoof, “stop right there. You saw what happened when you tried to just blatantly give her a large sum of money. She’s a working mare and she has a respectful amount of pride. Plus, and need I remind you of this, if you stray too far from your host’s personality, you could cause any number of unpredictable rifts in spacetime. Draw Out’s profile says he’s not a total scumbag, but he has a tendency to objectify mares and the only reason nopony accuses him of having a gambling problem is that he usually wins.”
The minty mare looked back at the golden stallion in the mirror, who matched her worried look. She suspected it was probably uncharacteristic of him to look that way. “I…I can’t do that,” she watched Draw Out say. “I barely know how to play poker, and objectifying mares…I mean…I’m a mare. That’s like the cosmic joke of a lifetime.”
Hal cast his gaze out the window, looking upon the rapidly darkening street. Lights were popping on one-by-one, and the remaining ponies that were still out were shady looking to say the least. “Tissy says that four days from now, Draw Out and Tilt are going to end up in a knife fight. Cozy tries to break it up and Tilt kills her in a fit of rage.” Hal swallowed, “…Tilt finally goes to jail, but that’s small comfort for Cozy’s kids. eighty-four point six percent chance.”
Quantum blanched. “What if I just leave town for four days?”
Hal booped lazily, and shook his head. “Rises to ninety-two point one percent. Tissy doesn’t know why.” He eyed his friend, “For some reason, Draw needs to be there. If you want those kids not to lose their mother, you’re gonna have to be a chauvinistic stallion until Tissy can figure out what you can do to prevent it. Draw is still in the picture when Cozy gets murdered, so obviously just his presence isn’t going to be enough.”
Quantum moved away from the mirror. She didn’t get halfway across the small room before Hal stopped her.
“Don’t walk like that,” Hal ordered. Quantum looked back at her rump.
“Walk like what?”
“You’re swinging your hips too much. Stallions don’t move like that. And don’t bat your eyes all the time.” Hal flitted over, landed next to Quantum, knelt a bit, and began poking his holographic hoof randomly through her body.
“St-stop that,” Quantum blushed, “A-and I’m not batting, I’m squinting. Force of habit. I didn’t get my first pair of glasses until I was almost eight.”
“Head up,” Hal commanded, ignoring the minty mare’s protests. “Shoulders back. This guy is proud of himself. Smile slyly, not genuinely. Douse yourself in too much stallion musk after you take a bath. Talk to those sleazy poker players down there like they’re your friends. Laugh loudly, and obnoxiously. Smack mares on the rump as they clop by,” Hal looked up seriously, “Any mare that clops by.”
Quantum got a horrifying mental image, and narrowed her eyes. “If you think for one solitary second that I’m going to smack my own mother’s behind and grin at her when she walks past me, you’ve got one additional think coming for every hoof I have to pound you with! You’re disgusting!”
Hal’s expression didn’t change. He adjusted his pocket protector, straightened his garish collar, and stood up straight. “And don’t judge a book by its cover. How would you like it if I called you a weak little mare that should just go home and make me a sandwich?”
Infuriated, Quantum took a swing at her classmate. The blow passed harmlessly through Hal’s forehead. He didn’t flinch.
“Well,” he went on, “that’s how I feel when you call me ‘disgusting’. For the next four days you’re one of those punks downstairs, so get used to it. Since you already pissed Cozy off, nopony’s likely to come calling tonight, so you’re going to stay here with me until I’m sure you’re walking and talking at least well enough to fake your way by. When I’m satisfied, then you’re going to sleep. You need your rest. Call room service for your dinner too, because I’m not having you get lightheaded from hunger tomorrow.”
Quantum glanced down at the beige carpet. She dug a track in it with her hoof and felt a bluegreen warmth grow on her cheeks. “…I’m sorry,” she apologized softly. “Thanks for helping me, Hal.”
Hal grinned an honest grin. “I’m sorry too. I told you Cutie, you’re my friend. I’m looking out for you, even if I have to beat help into you by force.
For the next three hours, Quantum Trots the unicorn mare learned how to be Draw Out the unicorn stallion. She practiced her walk, practiced her talk, nailed down the basics of poker, ate dinner liberally, learned a few crass pickup lines from a book under the nightstand, and laughed more than she had in weeks. By the time the moon was high in the night sky, she felt her confidence rising. Maybe she really could pull this one off.
Coming down from laughter of his own, Hal adopted a thoughtful expression. “You know, I just realized something. Cutie, can you hold your liquor?”
“Hold it?” Quantum laughed, “Sure. The glass can’t be that heavy, can it?”
“That’s not what I…oh forget it,” Hal sighed, “I’ve never seen you take a drink of anything in all the time I’ve known you, and you’re small to boot. We’ll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it.”
Quantum changed the subject. “Hal…how can you be so sure I’ll be here for the four days we need to save Cozy? Wasn’t it just luck that my molecules didn’t destabilize until the apple harvest thing was worked out?”
Hal, who had returned to his perch on the windowsill, shrugged. “Truth be told? We can’t be sure of anything. Tissy’s got enough data now to put together a working theory. The way she sees it, the molecular destabilization that’s responsible for your repeated vaulting without actually having to return to the Accelerator has a pattern to it – it always seems to happen shortly after the one event that has the strongest causality strings attached to it. For example, you vaulted when the apple harvest problem was resolved, but we were never able to get accurate readings on Applejack herself, meaning that her fate wasn’t the most pivotal event occurring at the time. Oh, and to put your mind at ease, I did some checking and found out that Applejack is alive and well in our time. That reality…there’s just no way to know if that was ours or not.”
Quantum let out a relieved breath. Just as quickly, she felt a shiver run down her spine. “Glad to hear that, but…what about that…’other’ place? Who, or what, is ‘Mane Saiah’?”
Hal quieted, his expression falling away. “We don’t know. There’s no evidence that civilization you were in existed at all, but it was so long ago in the timestream….we just don’t have records that go back that far. As for that colt…we really don’t know why he was important, either. Tissy’s equipment tried to scan him for a profile, but then it just went berserk. I’ve never seen Tissy like that before. She looked…” Hal swallowed, “She looked scared. She just kept telling me to make sure you saved him.” With that, the orange pegasus leaned back and let out a dreary, tired breath. “Tissy wouldn’t explain anything, but that’s par for the course with her. Meantime, you and I both need to get some rest. As for why your molecular structure seems to be attuned to the most pivotal events…I know you don’t want to hear this, but we don’t know that either. It just turned out that way. At the very least, it helps us to identify the most likely reason for your being here.”
Quantum sat on the bed. For a time, she couldn’t speak. Images of that empty white place flowed through her mind like water; the current bringing along with it the strange white pony with the black face, and the multitude of shadow creatures that cried liberally for her blood.
“I…I think I know why,” she finally said.
Quantum told her tale. Sharing that bizarre, disturbing experience calmed and centered her. When she finished, Hal took out his device and thoroughly scanned his classmate with it.
“I’m not getting anything that corroborates what you saw in that place. Let me take what you told me back to Tissy and see if we can work something out. While I’m at it, I’ll try to find records for a pegasus named Cozy Hearth in our time. If she’s alive, well…at least we know you have a chance of solving this, right?”
Quantum looked away. “You don’t have to do that. This isn’t our reality.”
“Oh? And how do you know that?”
The minty mare hesitated. “You said that Tissy has no readings on my mother. If I can’t do anything to change her situation while I’m here, then this can’t be our reality. When I was thirteen my mother was working odd jobs in Baltimare. Laundry, cooking, cleaning houses…she even did carpentry for a while.” She indicated the room with a mocking gesture, “there’s no way she’d be working in what basically amounts to a unicorn brothel.”
“Are you sure that’s what your mother was doing while you were in school?”
Quantum sighed, “…that’s what she told me.”
Hal’s eyebrows rose with concern, but he let the subject drop. “Eyes on the prize and hooves in the game, Cutie. Six young ones are depending on you. I’ll come back when I find out anything that might be helpful. Lay low and see what you can learn for now.”
Hal booped a colorful button, and the sheet of white light that lead back to 2039 opened up. He paused before stepping through.
“Cutie, if what you said about that white space is true…it answers a lot of questions. The way the Accelerator malfunctioned is so specific, well…” he paused, “…it just seems unlikely so many things could go so dramatically wrong in such an exact way.”
“What are you saying?” Quantum perked up.
“I’m not saying anything. Like I told you before, we’re making this up as we go along. Get some sleep. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Hal vanished before the minty mare could say goodbye. Quantum fell asleep on her back, staring at the drab ceiling and thinking about the last words she shared with her mother back in prison, which were spoken in anger.
Who’s reality was this, anyway?