//------------------------------//
// Chapter 1: The Thief 
// Story: A Threat As Old As Time 
// by Shadowmane PX-41 
//------------------------------//

Twilight walked through the portal and examined her surroundings. The first thing that she had come to notice was that it was almost three o' clock in the afternoon, meaning that the students of Canterlot High School would soon be going home for the evening. With that in mind, she gingerly leaned against the portal and waited for the time to pass.

After ten minutes of waiting, she heard the school's bell sound. As soon as the doors opened, Twilight began looking for her friends in the Human World.

"I tell ya what, Pinkie Pie, if I ever had to see another algebra test, I'd probably kick it as hard as one of my footballs," Rainbow Dash was talking to Pinkie Pie as she walked out of the doors. "Honestly, whoever came up with that cryptic code for triangle math was definitely in over their head or something..."

"It's not that bad, Rainbow Dash. Once you get it down, trigonometry's one of the easier equations," Sunset Shimmer said as she began to give Rainbow Dash a short lecture on trigonometry. "After you learn SOC CAH TOA, you can blitz your way through those papers. I'm sure if Twilight were here, she'd say—"

"The exact same thing," Twilight said, showing herself to the group of friends. "Nice to see you again, everyone."

"Twilight!" all of the girls ran up to her and gave her a hug. Twilight have always been there for them, so seeing her back in the Human World was a delight for the six of them.

"Where's Spike, Twilight?" Sunset asked, seeing that Twilight had travelled alone this time.

"He's back in Equestria, spending the weekend at the Crystal Empire with Shining Armour and Princess Cadence," Twilight said with a smile. "He always loved the Crystal Empire, ever since he was praised for his actions against Sombra..."

"So, what brings you back again, Twilight? Has somethin' else crawled out from Equestria ta try and destroy friendship?" Applejack asked. "Ah swear, everytime ya come here, there's always some plot being hatched by some power-hungry maniac."

"Well, I'm unsure of that at the moment, but I can say that the map has called me to the Human World," Twilight said. "It tells me that there's some friendship problem here that needs fixing. You haven't noticed anything strange recently, have you?"

"Now that you mention it..." Rarity began to think. "A tenth of the students didn't even show up today. A whole tenth!"

"How many students go here on a daily basis, Sunset?" Twilight asked, seeing if she could get the answers for exactly how many students a tenth of CHS was.

"From my last count, at least two-hundred students," Sunset said, adding in Rarity's discovery. "Meaning that twenty students were completely absent..."

"Do you think it could have been some illnesses or anything like that?" Fluttershy asked. "That would be the most likely thing. Everyone gets sick, even us..."

"But that's the thing, Fluttershy. Twenty students don't suddenly get sick to the point where they can be off of school for the day..." Sunset's suspicions grew. There was something going on that she was unaware of, and she was determined to get to the bottom of it. "There's gotta be something odd trying to take them away from us..."

"Did you try asking Celestia and Luna for help in finding the missing students?" Twilight asked another question.

"We tried, but when she called each of their individual phone numbers, they didn't pick up," Sunset said with a little bit of concern in her voice. "Every time she tried, she got the same message, and it was a very strange one to leave for them..."

"What did it say?" Twilight asked.

"It always said, 'call them when they grow up again'..." Sunset slowed down when she recited the message. There was no doubt about it, something was messed up about that message. "But why would the message be about the missing students growing up again? They're quite mature for their ages..."

"Are there any other occurrences that befell this town recently?" Twilight asked yet another question. As this point, she was taking no chances whatsoever. "If there's anything that can relate to the missing students, then we can piece together the truth and find the culprit, and fast..."

"Well, I did run into this really scary hooded man one day," Pinkie Pie said out of nowhere. "He was using really big words and carrying some big stick around him. He kept talking about how he would save friendship from being destroyed," she told the story how she remembered it. "I tried asking him about it, but he was such a big old meanie pants that he just walked away, saying that I was too old to comprehend friendships..."

"So, we can ascertain that you ran into a hooded man, but that doesn't add up to some of the students going missing all of a sudden..." Twilight began to get a mental puzzle of the mystery. "But he kept saying stuff about saving friendship, and that he carried a stick of sorts..."

"We can talk about it later, Twilight, but right now there's a special offer going down at Sugarcube Corner and I'm not passing that up," Rainbow Dash said as the group all broke out of their discussions of the problem at hand. "Come on, Twilight. I'm sure that a little time with a milkshake will help you try and figure out this mystery..."

Once their discussion was done for the time being, Twilight, Sunset, and the Humane Five began to take a walk towards Sugarcube Corner. But they all had the same thing plaguing their minds; if this criminal wasn't brought to justice, there might have been more problems to come for each of them.





Once everyone had gotten their drinks, they were quite leisurely sipping on them. Each of the girls was savouring the flavours as they were given more time to process what was going on.

"So what did that map call you here for, Twilight?" Rainbow Dash asked. "I mean, come on, this can't be some sort of coincidence..."

Twilight sighed. "The last time I was called by the map, it was to a bizarre town where everyone had the same Cutie Mark. It was utopian on the surface, but at the heart of it all, a malicious pony named Starlight Glimmer was conning ponies into living their lives in her town, then stealing their Cutie Marks to add to her collection," Twilight told the story.

"I don't think I want to hear more, Twilight..." Fluttershy began to show fear.

"Had Starlight Glimmer had her way, the Cutie Marks of me and my friends would have been lost forever. But luckily for us, Fluttershy was able to find an even darker secret," Twilight's voice turned much more enthusiastic. "She discovered that Starlight had been lying to the town all along, and that her equal sign mark was a fraud. In doing this, she ran off in a fit of rage, and the townsponies got their Cutie Marks back all on their own," she then sighed with how long ago that event was. "So I have to come to the assumption that whenever I'm called, there's gotta be someone trying to disrupt friendship..."

"Sounds like you've been through a lot, Twilight," Sunset patted Twilight on the back. "I know that what you told me doesn't sound all too pleasant, but the fact that you and your friends were able to expose Starlight and run her out of town was a great thing to do. And I know that if you were successful back there, you'll be able to do this now..." she looked Twilight in the eyes, showing her hope. "Believe in me, Twilight. Believe in all of us, and you can find the truth and get our students back..."

"Thank you, Sunset Shimmer." Twilight smiled and took another sip of her milkshake. "I'm glad to know that even when I'm away from Equestria, I have such grateful friends here as well..."

After a while of gossip and drinking, each of the girls eventually pulled out their phones and began looking for news online. All except for Pinkie Pie, who was busy playing a game involving candies. They were all trying their best to help Twilight out. If any of them could find any leads that matched up with the disappearing students, as well as the cryptic voicemail that Celestia and Luna had received, then there would be a chance that they would be able to find the criminal responsible and bring them to justice.

Twilight eventually got up from her seat and began pacing across the room. She put her hand on her chin and began stroking it with each pace. There was an answer, and the look on her face was a sign that she was going to find out what was going on. The more she began to think about the events, the more she thought back on the mysterious hooded man, and the stick that he carried.

"I've got it!" Twilight said as soon as she got a feint idea of what was going on. "Pinkie Pie, when you saw the hooded man, did you notice something off about his stick?"

"Well, it was made of gold, had a clock at the bottom of it, and looked like it was something that had come out of the city's treasury," Pinkie said, thinking about the stick that the man had been carrying around. "But wait a sec, Twilight. What does a stick have to do with students going missing?"

"Are you sure that it was really a stick, Pinkie Pie? Because from the description it sounds a bit like a golden rod..." Twilight then thought about items that resembled a golden rod. "That's it! Meadowbrook's newest enchanted item; the Staff of Time!"

"The Staff of Time?" the girls all said together, unaware on what Twilight was talking about.

"The Great Mage Meadowbrook had made a number of enchanted items back in Equestria, with each one possessing colossal magical powers," Twilight began to explain. "There were eight when I first heard about her, making the Staff of Time the ninth enchanted item."

"So what's this staff gotta do with missing students, Twi?" Rainbow Dash asked with a little bit of scepticism.

"The Staff of Time enables the user to freely control time. The user's allowed to stop and start time at will, travel through time, and there was a third property that it had, but Pinkie Pie accidentally damaged the last part of that particular page, so I don't know what the last part does," Twilight said. "But I do know that there was a big robbery at the museum where it was being held at last night. They say that there was a mysterious unicorn who completely stopped time, then jumped through it the second he was away from the night guards. If that hooded man is the same pony who stole the staff, then we could be looking at a dangerous threat here, everyone..."

"Time is a dangerous thing to play with, girls," Sunset began to tell each of the Humane Five. "If used incorrectly, time can be used to severely alter the past and re-write the future. Imagine what it would have been like if someone leapt into the past and made Diamond Tiara into the President of the United States... The world around us would change instantly, and not for the better..."

"That pony could very well try to jump back in time to try and undo what we did at the Fall Formal and the Battle of the Bands..." Rarity began to see the severity of the situation. "He could try and erase us from history even as we speak! Every second that I live I now worry that my body will suddenly fade away, my voice screaming as I vanish and the present changes for the worst!" her voice got more and more dramatic, and she found herself gasping for breath afterwards.

"Nah, I don't think that he's that heartless," Applejack said. "If anythin, if he talked about saving friendship, he'd probably go back in time to worm his way into our hearts and make our battles that much easier for us..."

"We need to find this pony, and fast!" Twilight said, running out of Sugarcube Corner. "If he's not captured before he time-jumps, he could wreck the past and ruin the future for good!"

As Twilight ran out, Sunset Shimmer and each of her friends followed closely behind her. The six of them were quite concerned for Twilight, knowing that she couldn't face the holder of the Staff of Time alone. They had to be there for her, otherwise she could have very well met her final match.





Meanwhile, in an alleyway, three girls were walking with a hint of fear beginning to show on their faces. There was a girl with hair that started purple, but turned blue after a while. She was accompanied by a girl with a spiky headband making a ponytail out of her dark pink hair, and a girl with white and black striped hair.

"Are you sure that he's down here, Violet?" the girl with the sunrise hair asked.

"Trust me, Pixel, he's definitely here. Why else would he promise us eternal friendship?" Violet said with confidence in her smile. "You want to be friends forever, don't you?"

"Y-Yeah, but this really isn't the best place to discuss how to maintain a friendship," she then turned to the third girl of the group. "Don't you agree, Photo Finish?"

"While zis place is dark and secretive, the seriousness on zat man's face was undeniable," Photo Finish responded. "If he has a way to make friends into eternal friends, zen I'm willing to know his secret..."

As soon as the girls walked into the middle of an open area of the alleyway, the hooded man appeared from the shadows, brandishing the Staff of Time. He looked at each of the three girls and let out a smile of his own.

"Greetings, Photo Finish, Pixel Pizazz, and Violet Blurr. I trust you have been thinking about my offer?" he said as he introduced himself to the group.

"Yes. We've been thinking long and hard about it, and we've come to the agreement that your idea sounds wonderful," Violet spoke for the whole group. "If you truly have a way to make us into friends forever, then we'd be more than willing to see it..."

"You have chosen very wisely, Snapshots. Forgive my large knowledge on you, but you see, I've had all the time in the world to see your reputation at Canterlot High," the hooded man said as he held the staff out for all three of the girls to see. "You three grow old, and your friendship is beginning to crumble as we speak. I have forseen the future, and precisely in two years time after you leave CHS, you three will forget all about each other, and be doomed to spend the rest of your lives alone..."

"Is that for real?" Pixel asked suspiciously. "We'd never lose each other, not even when we leave CHS. We'd always stick by each other, no matter what."

"I have met many other ponies who said exactly the same thing, girls. And after seeing their futures, I saw that they were wrong," the man said as he began to spin the staff counter-clockwise. "Luckily for them, they were given salvation from their fates, and I gave them friendships that lasted forever and ever. And now, Photo Finish, Pixel Pizazz, and Violet Blurr, you shall join the others I have granted salvation, and spend an eternity with as many friends as you can possibly imagine!"

The staff suddenly fired three white beams at the girls, striking them square in their chest areas. Each one of them felt like they were changing altogether. They felt like they were losing their strength, and losing their mental capacities at the same time. To accompany their losses, they were also beginning to shrink down and get shorter with each passing section. The last thing that they let out before the transformation's completion were three deafening screams.





"What was that?" Twilight could immediately hear the screams of three girls echoing across the town. "It sounded like three innocent girls..."

"It came from downtown!" Sunset said, leading the group towards the screams. "Come on, everyone! If we're fast, we can bag this punk before he can mess up time even more!"

Each of the girls nodded their heads and charged off with Sunset towards the noise that they had heard. If Sunset's assumptions were right, and this criminal was altering the flow of time, then they were truly in grave peril.





After a while of running, the girls finally arrived at the dark alley where the Snapshots had walked down. The alley itself was quite large, big enough for the entire group to barely squeeze together and walk down as a group. Twilight and Sunset looked quite serious and began to lead the group into the alley.

"Alright girls, let's see if we can find this time traveller and give him a beatdown the size of an apple tree..." Applejack said as the group slowly but surely entered the dark alley to find the thief who had taken the Staff of Time.

"Umm, can we come back later, girls?" Fluttershy's shy attitude began to kick in when she saw the darkness of the alley begin to intensify. "There's all kinds of scary things in an alley like this, including spiders, rats, and drug dealers..."

"It's alright, Fluttershy. You can hold onto my hand for support," Rainbow Dash held out her hand and saw Fluttershy immediately grab onto it. "Whatever's down here is gonna be sorry it messed with The Rainbooms..."

At last, the girls arrived at the exact location where The Snapshots and the hooded man with the Staff of Time had been talking. They surveyed the entire area, but found nothing of use to them. Not even the shadows harboured a clue.

"This creep is much more dastardly then I thought," Sunset said, thinking about how evil the thief had become over the latest things that he had done. "I mean, stealing an artifact, possible disruption of the timeline, and now kidnapping Canterlot High Students? This guy deserves to go to the sun once he gets taken back to Equestria; or at the very least, sent to Tartarus for his crimes..." 

"Ohmygosh, girls! Look!" Pinkie Pie suddenly pulled up a pair of glasses, a spiked headband, and two pigtail accessories with weird designs.

Sunset gasped with horror when she identified the items that Pinkie Pie had shown her. "Those belong to Photo Finish, Pixel Pizazz, and Violet Blurr! The thief stole them too! This is horrible..."

"Yeah! Without those three, who's going to write CHS's weekly newspaper?" Pinkie said.

"This isn't about newspaper, Pinkie. Someone's stealing our friends, and trying to scare us, but I can assure you that we'll find this creep, and we'll bring him to justice!" Rainbow Dash fist-pumped as she gave a motivational pep talk to her friends.

Meanwhile, the hooded man was standing on top of a roof, looking down at each of The Rainbooms with a serious glare in his eyes. He used the Staff of Time to stop it for a brief instance so that he knew what he was facing.

"Hmm... Pinkie Pie, Rainbow Dash, Twilight Sparkle, Rarity, Applejack, Fluttershy, and Sunset Shimmer," he said to himself. "From what I've seen, the six girls stopped Sunset Shimmer, then befriended her afterwards. Six and a half months later, Sunset joined their little friend group to stop The Dazzlings, the band name of the three sirens that Starswirl the Bearded banished eons ago..."

"This could be trouble..." the man said to himself as he rubbed the Staff of Time in his hands. "Those cretins are going to ruin everything, which is why I'll have to take them out. They don't know it yet, but their age is their greatest enemy. And once I eliminate it, The Rainbooms will be out of the picture, and friendship will be saved forever!"

The mysterious hooded man picked up three small figures and concealed them in his cloak. Then, he leapt down and looked at Twilight and Sunset, who were still frozen in time. "So run along now, my sweet little Rainbooms. Soon your curses will be broken, and I shall give you all of the friends you could ever want!" he opened up another portal and leapt through it with the three figures, starting up time again once his portal had vanished along with him.

Once time started up again, Twilight felt a chill in the air, as if it was foreboding that she would eventually succumb to the thief's power. She shivered and kneeled down slightly, grabbing the attention of all of her friends.

"What's wrong, Twilight?" Sunset asked, seeing Twilight's slight distress appear out of nowhere.

"I don't know, Sunset, I just got a little chill..." Twilight said, getting up slowly. "It's as if something just looked at me and told me that there's absolutely no hope for me or my friends..."

"We need to find this thief, and soon. He's got The Snapshots now, and it's only a matter of time before he strikes again!" Pinkie said, then laughed. "Get it, a matter of time?"

"PINKIE!" everyone shouted at her.

"This is no laughing matter, Pinkie Pie. If this thief isn't stopped, who knows? You might be his next victim, and then you'd never be able to throw parties or make your friends laugh ever again!" Twilight said, making Pinkie understand just how dire the problem was.

"That... time-warping... friend-stealing... JERK!" Pinkie's rage grew quite rapidly once the thought of her bringing no more parties of laughter sunk into her mind. "When I get my hands on that punk, he's gonna wish he never dared to threaten me, my friends, or my parties!"

"Good to know you're with us, Pinkie," Applejack said, putting her hands on Pinkie's shoulders to calm her down. "Time is of the essence, pun not intended, and this varmint has to show himself eventually..."

"Yes, but until then, we're stuck at an impasse," Twilight's expression grew dire. "We're dealing with someone who has complete control of all of time itself, and will probably try to use that to take away all of our friends!"


To Be Continued...