//------------------------------// // Letters of Friendship // Story: The Amazing Spider-Man: The Web of Friendship // by Time Pony Victorious //------------------------------// TWILIGHT SPARKLE Twilight stared at the empty scroll for twenty minutes before deciding to write something on it. She started with something simple: Dear Princess Celestia, before frowning and crumpling the paper up and tossing it aside. How was she supposed to explain it to Princess Celestia? Explain Peter Parker and the whole mess of interdimensional travel? Twilight wouldn’t be sure if she could believe Peter’s story if she hadn’t seen it for herself. Guilt gnawed at the back of her mind, she was incredibly presumptuous for promising to find a solution to Peter’s problem. Traveling between dimensions had proven difficult last time, how could she possibly replicate it now, to a place she had never even seen? Twilight sighed as her quill hovered above the scroll, hesitantly deciding her words but they never came to her. In desperation, Twilight slammed her head against the tabletop, in an effort to force the words into her mind. How presumptuous of her to decide she knows what to do. Telling Peter that she would have the answers when in harsh reality she knew just as much as he did. But something felt horrible about being brutally honest to Peter. How on Equis could she just tell Peter, “Hey! Remember when I said I could get you home? Total lie!” “Ugh, what am I supposed to do?” Twilight grumbled. She sat up at her desk, looking over the crumbled up letters and thought long and hard about Peter’s situation. Let’s see. He is something called a human from another universe that fell through to this universe by unknown circumstances. For some reason, despite being a human, his physiology was perfectly transmogrified into an Earth Pony but he retained his super abilities. “Yeah, that sounds crazy,” Twilight concluded. But then again, if Twilight traveled back in time to only a few years ago and told her younger self that she would become an alicorn and eventually the Princess of Friendship with her own castle and everything she would’ve said the same thing. Twilight looked over to the side of her desk to the destroyed devices Peter brought. What did he call them, web-shooters? Levitating the devices to her face, Twilight scrutinized them. They were incredibly sophisticated but were clearly not designed for hooves, the activation sensor seems to be designed for longer, thinner appendages. Well, if she can’t write a letter, she’ll do the next best thing. Levitating a pair of safety goggles on her head, Twilight took the web-shooters down to the basement, to her laboratory. “Time for science!” Twilight didn’t realize how long she was downstairs until somepony knocked on the basement door. “Busy!” Twilight shouted back, not taking her eyes off her vacuum-sealed magic-resistant container. “If you want to rob me, the money’s under my bed!” “What?” answered Peter from behind the door. “No, Twilight, it’s Peter! I was looking all over for you.” “Oh!” Twilight raised her goggles up and glanced at the clock. “Oh pony-feathers…” It was 8! She’d be down here all day! Opening the door with her magic, Twilight tried to straighten her no-doubt messy mane, and smiled as Peter stepped in. He looked around with an impressed expression. Twilight’s laboratory was twice the size of her library and contained rows of scientific equipment. Supercomputers the size of bookshelves lined the back row along with a few dozen magical related equipment. “Whoa, big lab,” Peter muttered as he looked around. “Almost as big as the one at Oscorp.” “What’s that?” “Long story.” “Speaking of long stories, how was your day?” Peter looked at her, his big brown eyes twinkling with delight. “Pretty good, I mean, as good as it can be being in a universe filled with muticolored talking ponies, but still. Rarity fixed up my duds though I’m not sure how much superheroing I can be doing here. Ponyville is kinda… quiet.” Twilight shrugged. “It’s always been like this, but when it gets loud it’s pretty intense.” “I can imagine…” Peter said, his eyes drifting off to the table behind Twilight. “Um, what’re you working on?” “Oh!” Twilight turned, released the seal of her container and removed the object inside and presented it to Peter. “Look, I fixed your webshooters!” Excitingly, Twilight tied one of the webshooters to his left hoof. Aesthetically speaking it looked exactly the same, well, except less charred and broken. But Twilight explained all of the modifications she’d done while appropriating it to Peter’s hoof. “It took a while, but I figured out the firing mechanism. Pretty ingenious, if I should say so. It’s designed to activate from pressure but not just pressure, right? Accompanying how your limb stretches and tenses you can control the degree of webbing and the amount, preeetty smart. I had to increase the sensitivity since my hooves won’t activate it entirely and I modified it so you don’t have to directly touch the sensor. Just flex and tense your hoof and it’ll work.” Peter stared at the webshooter which felt incredibly light-weight. Raising his foreleg, he experimentally tensed his leg inward and a strand of web fired off, slamming into the wall opposite of him. “Whoa!” Peter exclaimed, chuckling. “It worked!” It felt weird not doing the finger gesture to fire the web but it’ll be something he’d have to get used to. “I’ve magically warded the webshooters as well,” Twilight explained, her horn lighting up and wrapping the webshooter in her purple aura. “It is resistant to alicorn level magic (though I’m not sure you’ll be fighting alicorns) and properly grounded so it can’t be fired by electromagnetism. There’s also a panic button installed.” She removed the webshooter and presented it to Peter, showing off an emblem on top of it that looked like her cutie mark. “If you press it and think of, um, me it’ll send off this magical flare that’ll let me know where you are.” Peter scrutinized the webshooter, wishing he had his glasses (for some reason his contacts didn’t come with him to this universe). “What’d you use for the web?” “Easy, actual spider web.” “What?” Twilight gestured over to a loom-like device to the side of the lab which stretch and spun tons of web around. “Well, the spider it came from is a bit more magical in nature. Giant Spiders are common in the Everfree Forest and they produce a lot of web that can be used for fabric and stuff. It’s really tough and, like the webshooter, protected against magic. Not even my magic can tear it, but it’ll deteriorate after a few hours.” “Wow,” Peter muttered, incredibly impressed by Twilight’s resources and skills. “Thanks, Twilight, I really appreciate it… but…” “But?” “Well, not for nothing, but this is making it seem like… my staying here isn’t very temporary.” Twilight bit her lip and glanced at the floor. “Dimensional magic is tough,” she admitted. “It’s even tougher if the universe you came from isn’t inherently compatible to magic.” “You said you could do it.” “I said I’d try,” Twilight corrected. “And I have been.” She gestured to another table which were filled with magic spell books and creepy ritualistic symbols drawn into a leather-bound book and a vial that was filled with something that looked suspiciously like blood. “It isn’t that it’s impossible to create a portal,” Twilight explained. “It’s just without a proper frame and dimensional-trajectory calculations, even if I could make a portal, I have no clue where and when you’ll end up. And that’s not even taking the spatial-lensing effect into consideration.” Peter deflated. Staring at his hooves, wondering if this will be like this for the rest of his life. Twilight draped her forearm around Peter and pulled him into a hug. “It’s okay, I’m not giving up, Peter,” Twilight muttered gently. “But if it doesn’t work out… you’ve got friends here, okay?” Peter swallowed the lump in his throat and could only manage a nod, for fear his voice would break. … … … The cave was damp and freezing. The wind howled like the souls of the damned outside and the blizzard raged on. The cave was not formed naturally, evident by the still smoking sides, like the searing flesh afflicted by a gunshot wound. The stench of smoke and something inhumanly disgusting filled the cave, like a desiccated body. Snow and ice crackled under the weight of his heavy boots. Clad in a smokey black shroud, the stranger entered the cave without fear or trepidation. Following the wound against the side of the mountain deeper and deeper until he found what he came for. The cause of the newly formed cave. Doctor Otto Octavius lay in a broken heap. The Stranger wasn’t sure if he was still alive. Nudging Doctor Octavius’s leg with his foot, the esteemed doctor flinched in his comatose state. At his side lay the most perfect object in this universe… and the others. A blue cube, glowing and filling the cave in an unnatural blue hue. Kneeling, he removed the garb around his head to get a better look at the cube. Revealing the skin on his head had thinned and been stretched tight, so it resembled more of a skull than anything. That and his unnatural red skin collaborated into a perfectly sinister visage. “Well, well,” he muttered in a German accent. “Never have I thought I would see this again. The tesseract…”