//------------------------------// // Chapter Four // Story: Next Tuesday Morning // by Flutterdude //------------------------------// Twilight weighed the pros and the cons of the last night's sleep. On the plus side, she hadn't died. And neither had her two surviving friends. On the minus side, she had this really annoying kink in her neck and now her mane was probably messy and tangled beyond repair. Pinkie Pie woke up and began putting on her jumpsuit again, her mane becoming good as new with a balloon-like poof. Rainbow Dash, however, had not enjoyed the night at all. She was used to sleeping on clouds back in her home, in the cleverly-named floating pegasus city of Cloudsdale. Sleeping on a land pony bed of padding and springs had not done her back justice at all. She awoke and stood up with audible pops in her bones. She twisted her neck and a series of cracks resonated through her body. She massaged the back of it with her hoof. "Uh-oh, I think Rainbow Dash is broken," said Pinkie with a grin. Suddenly, she turned to Twilight and thrust her hoof into the unicorn's neck, making a noise that sounded like breaking bones and flooring her. "I think Twilight's broken, too." Twilight got up and was about to break Pinkie Pie herself when she found that the kink in her neck was gone. "No, I think you fixed me, actually." Rainbow Dash sprinted toward Pinkie and karate-chopped her back. It made a cracking sound and Pinkie took her turn on the floor. She straightened her back and turned to Dash. "My back was fine, thank you very much." "I think Pinkie Pie's broken." Now that they had sufficiently massaged each other (whether they were aware of it or not), Twilight said, "Alright, girls, come on. Another day of dramatically walking toward Canterlot awaits us." "We go!" shouted Pinkie Pie enthusiastically. "I'm tired. And my knee hurts." "Which knee?" "... "My wing hurts. And I have to go to the bath room." "I asked you about that five minutes ago." "Well, I didn't have to go then!" "Rainbow, stop it. Complaining will get us nowhere." "Well, Twi, walking doesn't seem to be doing much better!" "If my plan works, then you'll probably never remember this ever happening. How's that?" "Hurmmph..." "Say, Twi, how much longer 'til we're in Canterlot?" "Umm... I think it's... March 11th now. Sunday. So we should be there in about two more days." "Are we there yet?" "Rainbow, I just said that we'll be there in two days." "UGH. This is so un-rainbow." "Alright, go do your business behind those bushes there. I've a feeling using an indoor rest room would be a bit risky. We'll stay here unless you decide to give up privacy for the sake of safety." Rainbow Dash chose privacy and flew off behind some bushes. Pinkie and Twilight were left standing in the middle of a four-way intersection. The signs saying "ONE WAY" or "STOP" or "YIELD" were all off-kilter, dented, and in generally bad shape. The packed dirt street had deep ruts in it and roadside stands were in shambles. Twilight held the pistol Pinkie had given her by Sugar Cube Corner in her magical grip, and Pinkie had her rifle strapped on a break-away holster to her shoulders. Some news papers tumbled by dramatically. "So, Twilight, how does this whole time travel thing work, anyway?" "Well, I thought time travel was impossible. But apparently there are special fetishes that allow unicorns - uh, and alicorns - to go back in time in some way or another." "You mean only unicorns and alicorns can go back in time?" "I don't know. I really should look into it more." "Why didn't you? You live in a library." "Thanks for reminding me, I'd almost forgotten." She shot a deadpan gaze at Pinkie. "I guess I didn't bother with time travel books because I thought it was all a bunch of hog wash." "So... how exactly did future Twilight show up? What was it like?" "I guess she only had a few minutes to tell me whatever she wanted in the past before she went back to the future." "Wait, if the future hasn't happened yet, doesn't that mean she went to the present?" "But this is the present." "What if this is the past? What if this is the past and future Twilight is actually present Twilight?" "But then that means-- umm..." Pinkie narrowed her eyes in thought. "Theoretically, if you received a message from the future, assuming that the future describes events that have not yet happened, you actually received a message from the present and we're still in the past. But that raises questions of its own. For example, if time keeps progressing at its current rate, then that means we'll never be in the present. We'll always be in the past. We'll only catch up to the events of the present after they happen. Since apparently we're not able to control the present, always being stuck in the past, our entire lives are a series of predetermined events. Even me explaining this could be a predetermined event that I had no control over, even though I thought I did. If that's the case, then--" "That's kind of depressing to think about." There was a pregnant pause as both of them realized that they were getting out-of-character. However, they were making progress in understanding what was happening, so Pinkie continued. "... Well, it might not be the case." "I'm pretty sure it isn't the case." "Then where did future Twilight come from?" "The future!" "Then that means the future has already happened!" Twilight thought for a second. "What if the future doesn't describe events that have not yet happened?" "Then just take my theory about our lives being predetermined events and replace 'past' with 'present' and 'present' with 'future'." "... That's still depressing to think about." Pinkie Pie thought for a second. "Is there a way to change the future? Or convert the past to the present and the present to the future so that we become part of the true present?" "I don't know," Twilight said, feeling her brain working as she spoke. Pinkie steered the conversation back on topic. "So, what happens if your plan works?" "Then the past becomes permanently altered by giving past Twilight prior knowledge of Cerberus's arrival and Fluttershy's attempt to intervene. Then if she has any sense in her, which she does, of course, since she is me, after all, she'll let Fluttershy deal with the problem. Then this whole thing with the possessed and the quarantining and what-not would've never happened and things would be right again." "Would we remember all of this?" "I doubt anypony except maybe myself might remember it." "So... you can alter the past?" "I guess." "Can you alter the present?" "Of course. And the present determines the future, so what you do in the present directly begets what the future turns out to be." "Or you could alter the past and change the present to determine the future?" "... Possibly. I think, maybe." "Can you go to the future?" "You can't go to a place that doesn't exist." "Then where's future Twilight from?" "Bucking hay, Rainbow Dash is taking a long time back there!" Twilight and Pinkie had talked for a little while more even after Rainbow Dash had done her business. In a nut shell, their theory was: Future Twilight was actually better described as present Twilight. She was living in the real present, whereas the protagonists presently walking down a deserted street toward Canterlot were in the past. Their whole, ongoing adventure was a series of events that Twilight and everypony else from the actual present had determined of their own free will. So, in a cosmic sort of way, they did have control over their lives, except everything that they did was already done in the present. As far as they were concerned, past, present, and future were entirely interchangeable terms, depending on where one stood in the timeline, the timeline being a series of points that could be accessed by certain spells. Apparently these spells worked as a sort of disaster-prevention system. For all they knew, they could've been used in the past. This dark age in Ponyville's history certainly called for some serious fixing up. Canterlot was abandoned and within the possessed zone, so they figured they could just go there and would be met with little resistance or annoying paperwork to shuffle. Then they would alter the past so that Cerberus was taken back to Tartarus safely, this whole mess never happened, and Ponyville was safely inhabited and disaster-free, as if nothing had ever happened. Because technically, nothing ever had happened. That alternate continuity would be erased from history and replaced with one wherein everypony was safe and sound and didn't have to worry about being eaten by the possessed every waking moment. The future/present Twilight had come to the present/past from NEXT TUESDAY MORNING, as it was in the continuity wherein Ponyville and Canterlot became zombified crap sacks, the continuity Twilight and her friends were in presently, and trying to erase. Therefore, if this continuity was erased somehow and replaced with one wherein everything was right again, the unkempt, vagabond future Twilight would have never existed, because Cerberus would never have blown up and strewn his dark energy all over the place. She would have never used the time travel spell and created this brain-bending nonsense in the first place. Instead, Twilight and everypony else would truly be in the real present, where they did have control over their lives in every sense. And it would stay that way until somepony used the time travel spell again to undo some other horrible, preventable disaster. Get it? Got it? Good. "I'm hungry." "Shut up, Rainbow Dash." "I'm hungry, too." "Zip it, Pinkie Pie." Twilight's stomach growled. "Hey, guys, let's go get something to eat." Pinkie Pie quietly skipped alongside Twilight with light bags under her eyes. "How long has it been since we ate last?" Twilight thought about the point. Hunger probably had something to do with her recurring head aches and general awful feeling. "I don't think I've eaten anything since Cerberus blew up." "I ate yesterday just before I flew off to find you guys." "I had a couple cup cakes yesterday morning, but that's it," said the sugar-loving pink one. "Alright, let's go find some food." She looked to her right. "Hey, look, a bakery!" "How convenient yet anti-climactic!" "We go!" The three of them ran into the bakery and locked the double doors behind them. Ponyville hadn't been a possessed ghost town for terribly long, so the bread in the display cases was the freshest they would probably find in Ponyville. Twilight trotted behind the counter to pick the locks to the cases. Pinkie Pie lifted the lid off of a small display tray and took a bite out of a piece of bread in it. "Eww, it's all stale and icky!" Without missing a beat, Rainbow Dash deadpanned, "That's because it's plastic." "Oh." "Hey, while you guys were busy being Laurel and Hardy back there, I got the locks to open." Twilight telekinetically floated some pieces of bread to her friends. The bread and other pastries were cold and beginning to fall apart. Crumbs and flakes covered the table they sat at and the linoleum floor beneath it. "It isn't a cup cake, or even a cake-cake, but it'll do," said Pinkie, surprised by the lack of sugar in her pastries. They smiled the whole time. It was among the best meals they'd ever had. A band of three ponies walked through the dank streets of Ponyville. One of them was a unicorn. Another was a pegasus. "That's stray tumbling news paper #119," said the pegasus. Oh, and the third one was a unicorn, too. They were also all wearing hazmat suits. Should've mentioned that earlier. "Yep," said one of them regarding the other's comment on stray tumbling news papers. "C'mon, let's inspect this trash can here." "Why?" said the other unicorn. "I dunno." "Well, I guess there isn't anything better to do." They moved to the trash can and scanned it for contagious biological infections. One of them looked to their left, down another old, battered street and saw the back ends of three equinoid creatures rounding a corner. "Hey, there are some more of them," he said. "Maybe we should get going now." "Yeah, let's," said the pegasus. They located the nearest exit point and prepared to report their grim statistics and add them to the growing list of grim statistics. Further down the street, one of the equinoid creatures, a unicorn, said, "What's the sky like on the outside?" One of them, a pegasus, said, "It's just like it was before Cerberus blew up. The sky would be kinda pretty if we were to see it right now." She looked in the direction of the setting Sun. It wasn't a rainbow, or even rainbow-colored, but she would settle for anything easy on the eyes to watch at this point. The third one, an earth pony, liked this new Sun-set. It was tinted pink. "I wish the sky was pink all the time!" "Blue!" the cyan pegasus contested. "Pink!" "Blue!" "Pink!" "Blue!" "I could do this all night if you wanted, pal." The purple unicorn shouted to the both of them, "Shut up, both of you! This chapter is almost over and you're wasting page space!" The abandoned buildings in this area were smaller, further-spaced, and catering to less urban needs than the abandoned buildings in the center of Ponyville. They also seemed a bit dirtier. The hazmats had been trying to find the cause of this. They figured it was nothing to worry about, just natural accumulation collected as a result of being on the outskirts of town, not too far from the deciduous forest that lightly covered the non-developed regions outside Ponyville. The purple unicorn spoke up again. "Girls, let's find a place to hole up for the night. We'll probably be leaving Ponyville by tomorrow and heading on the road to Canterlot. Maybe we should stock up on stuff like food and medical supplies." The pink one said confidently, "Guess who won the Ponyville Dumpster-Diving Championships three times in a row in high school?" "There's no such thing." "Yuh-huh, we held it at mid-night near the college every year in April! Applejack can attest to that, too!" She ran off to scour the rubbish nearest her, looking for anything of use. The purple one and the blue one began looking for a good place to survive the night in. "Could attest," said the pegasus.