I might not have had as much time as I thought.
I had lost an extra day. Maybe it was only a single day, but it threw all my assumptions out the window.
I went back home. I fetched my own saddlebags, the ones with my cutie mark on them, and gathered up some items. Some were practical, like bits and nonperishable food, and others purely personal, like a picture of Lyra and I on vacation in Fillydelphia.
Next I went downstairs to the kitchen of my candy store, and stood in front of a perfectly ordinary cabinet. Opening it revealed bags of sugar, cocoa powder, and other ingredients. Those all got put on the counter. I then removed the cabinet’s false bottom.
There it was, where I had put it all those years ago and hadn’t looked at it since. I removed the box and placed it on a table. Lifting the lid revealed a makeshift collection of monster-fighting tools: nothing sophisticated, and certainly not anything classified, mostly just objects with sharp points or edges. I cobbled it together after The Agency was terminated.
You can remove the Special Agent from The Agency, but not The Agency from the Special Agent.
I hoped I didn’t need to use them—because they wouldn’t be very effective against the serious monsters—but my new home was in the Everfree Forest, and they were better than nothing.
I didn’t bother putting back the false bottom and bags of ingredients. Why bother? Tomorrow, they would never have been removed.
It was too early to go shopping and I wasn’t sure what else I needed; that would have to wait until I began exploring the old castle. I didn’t want to hang around until they all opened, anyway. So back to the Everfree I went.
I almost bumped into Zecora on the way back. I had steered clear of her hut inside that tree, but she was out and about collecting herbs. I should talk to her eventually, but I just wasn’t up to it.
The rest of the day I spent wandering about the ancient Castle of the Royal Sisters, hoping to uncover some of those “dangerous magics” in “secret chambers” that Twilight had mentioned. Dangerous or not, they might be useful to me. They’d be even more useful to me if I was a unicorn, but I’d cross that bridge when I got to it. Perhaps I could convince Twilight to help me out.
I only found one hidden room that day, full of books that had rotted away. The standard preservation spell must have failed centuries ago. I could only hope this room was the exception.
Perhaps more curious was what I had not found: evidence of structural unsoundness. Granted, I had not explored every nook and cranny, but in hindsight it made sense. This castle had been built out of stone blocks, and stone ages rather well.
Regardless, I was playing it safe. I always had my saddlebags with me just in case. I figured that if I triggered a collapse and got trapped, I only needed to sleep on it and the collapse would be undone when I woke up.
And if I got crushed? That was a damn good question and it needed an answer. Channeling my inner Twilight, I decided to run an experiment: using a knife from my anti-monster kit, I ever so slightly broke the skin on my left, rear leg and applied a bandage.
Tomorrow, I’ll know one way or the other.
I stood in front of the public announcements board outside the Town Hall. This time another three days had been erased, or fourteen days total since I had vanished. Not good, not good at all.
On top of that, the self-inflicted cut was still there, so no magic do-over if I got seriously injured—never mind killed.
I had left at the crack of dawn, the better to avoid ponies going about their business. That was probably a bit paranoid. Most ponies did not know me or pay attention to missing pony notices, and the worst that would happen would be “what happened?” questions. Nevertheless, answering such questions would eat up time that was all too clearly running out faster than I liked.
Once I got home, the first thing I noticed was the total absence of candy on the shelves of the store. How much longer before there wouldn’t be a store? In the kitchen, the counters were bare, as I had expected. I opened the cabinet and once again removed the bags of raw ingredients. Upon removing the false bottom, I saw an empty space.
The kit had been in my saddlebags as I wore them overnight. Whatever was going on, it didn’t permit duplicates to be made. When had the kit “disappeared?” The same time I had? There was no way to know.
Not bothering to put anything back, again, I made my way upstairs. Anything that had spent the night in my saddlebags was gone. As an experiment, back at the castle I had left the bits out on the table overnight. They were gone when I woke up. Sure enough, there they were, in the drawer where I kept my money.
I briefly considered leaving them there. I could re-spend the money each day. But while the money would return here, whatever I had bought with it would not return to the pony who had sold it to me. That didn’t seem right.
Besides, it was only a matter of time before I was presumed dead. I could not depend on these bits being here. I took them. I’d keep them in the saddlebags overnight from now on.
Ponyfeathers. The bits would still return here once I had spent them. “Whatever,” I muttered to myself. Nothing I could do about it. I resolved to make it up to the ponies affected once I was cured.
Five days of my past had been erased next, then eight. The somewhat faded missing pony poster stated I had disappeared twenty days before the wedding, which had taken place twenty days ago. If this pattern held as I perceived it, I calculated that my birth would be erased in two weeks.
I really didn’t want to find out what would happen then. Funny how that focused my priorities.
Lyra should have been back, but I hadn’t gone home again; I couldn’t stomach explaining why I had been gone for twenty four, then forty days. She wouldn’t remember anyway. The next time it would be sixty-six days. About a week, from my perspective, and I would be a complete stranger to her.
I had also stayed away from Twilight; it was clear I wasn’t going to get any more information out of her. I did try to locate Discord, since he’d been a little bit more forthcoming, but without success. That was curious. Wasn’t I still the “epicenter of a reality warp?” I would have thought that “warp” got larger each time.
That left as my best bet the exploration of the ancient castle, however long those odds might have been.
I was in another of those hidden rooms. I was beginning to get the hang of it, this being the seventh one I had found so far. Fortunately, the preservation spell had failed only in that first one. This one held a collection of gems, presumably enchanted and lying on a shelf, and a bookcase holding around fifty books. None of the other rooms had anything useful. This, unfortunately, looked like more of the same.
Trying to stay optimistic, I slid off my saddlebags. Now comfortable, I began perusing the books.
While I was on the third book, I heard voices approaching.
“Why are we here again?” a scratchy voice demanded. “We know the bugbear isn’t inside this castle.”
“And I’m te-te-telling you, there’s a-a-a doozie here!”
“Let’s just find it before ya shake yerself apart.”
“It’s around here, s-s-s-somewhere.”
Great, now what?
The Element Bearers were right outside—three of them, at least—and it wasn’t hard to figure out what the “doozie” was. The door was well hidden, so unless Twilight was with them—
The door opened, revealing the alicorn.
“Bon Bon?!”
“There’s your doozie, darling.”
Twilight entered the room. “You’ve been missing over a month! Lyra’s been sick with worry!”
Yeah, rub it in…
“Have you been here the whole time?!”
The other five had followed her in. I noted with some relief that Spike was not with them.
The door closed on its own, as designed to keep the room hidden.
“You could say that, yeah,” I cautiously answered.
“Do you know how dangerous it is exploring this castle?”
I didn’t have time for this. “Really, it’s okay. I was told this castle had structurally unsound parts and I’ve been real careful.”
“Structurally unsound,” Twilight skeptically repeated. “Who told you that?”
Wait, what?
Before I could question her on that…
“Uh, g-g-g-guys?” Pinkie said, violently shuddering. “That wasn’t it.”
Rainbow Dash hovered in the pink pony’s face. “How is that even possible?”
Good question, I thought. What could be a bigger doozie than me?
She shook again. “I dunno, it just is!”
Twilight spotted the collection of gems lying on a shelf. “That… shouldn’t be here.” She walked past me to get a closer look.
Applejack joined her. “Ya know what that is, Twi?”
“Yes, and I know it can’t be more than a few decades old.” Her horn lit up, and the gems glowed in response, one at a time in an apparently random sequence.
After the last one faded, they all simultaneously flashed three times. A section of the wall vanished, revealing a dark room. Wall-mounted crystals began glowing, lighting the room up and revealing floor-to-ceiling shelves on all the walls. My jaw dropped. What those shelves held was not supposed to exist anymore.
“That’s the doozie!”
Twilight entered the room and walked around, taking in the full shelves. She didn’t seem to recognize any of the objects they held, not that I would expect her to.
Applejack went in next. She stopped in front of a shelf holding objects bearing a long, thin shaft attached to a base with a hoof-grip, and she reached out to touch it.
“Don’t!” I shouted. “Don’t touch anything.”
Twilight turned to me. “You know what this all is?”
I entered the room. “Yes, but I thought Princess Celestia had it all destroyed.”
The alicorn nodded thoughtfully. “Instead she put it here, where nopony would ever stumble across it—in theory.” She walked towards that shelf. “Lucky I found it first.”
Yeah, lucky.
One of the objects Applejack had almost touched floated off the shelf. “So what is this,” Twilight said, an edge to her voice, “and what makes it so dangerous?”
This just wasn’t going to go away. Applejack was watching me like a hawk. Lying in front of the Element of Honesty was not going to get me far.
So I told the truth. “That is the type of weapon I used to capture the bugbear seven years ago.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “You captured the bugbear?”
“She’s not lying, Twi.”
Twilight eyed me for a moment, then she walked over to me with the weapon hovering in front of her. “What does it do?”
I considered being non-responsive, saying it was classified and on a need-to-know basis. That was indeed true, as miss lie detector over there would confirm, but that wasn’t likely to work on a princess, not even a princess who was now realizing she had been kept in the dark.
Sigh. The sooner I got this over with, the better. Maybe they’d take it and hunt the bugbear with it. It didn’t matter so long as I was left alone. Tomorrow it wouldn’t have happened anyway.
“It shoots a magical blast,” I began explaining. “Anything it hits will experience time dilation. The amount depends on various factors, including distance to and size of the target. The effects of multiple hits are cumulative, but the effects wear off in a matter of minutes. The point is to make it easier to secure the target by reducing its ability to fight back.”
Twilight was stunned. “Temporal magic like that is unheard of. Who made these?”
I shrugged. “You’d have to ask Princess Celestia that.”
“And you had one because…” Dash said, challenging me.
I sighed, this time out loud. “Because at the time I was working for a super-secret anti-monster agency—and before you ask, Princess Celestia shut it down and destroyed all evidence of its existence after the bugbear escaped from Tartarus.”
Twilight glanced at Applejack, who nodded in return.
“Well, not all of it was destroyed, lucky for us.”
She rotated it, inspecting it more closely. The firing mechanism was obvious enough, but that isn’t what caught her attention. “Strange, I’ve never seen runes like these before.”
Runes? I had never paid attention to that; I hadn’t cared how the weapon functioned, only that it did. Along the shaft there indeed were runes, a few of them all too familiar. An order of magic not known to ponies, I thought, remembering what Discord had said.
Did he misinform me, or was he misinformed himself?
“Anything else in here we could use?” Twilight asked me as she continued studying the weapon.
“No, not for a bugbear.”
There was something else Discord had told me. I needn’t worry about the bugbear anymore. Maybe it was time to put that to the test. Would I ever have better circumstances to do so?
I went over to the shelf and picked up a time stunner for myself. “I’m coming with you.”
Twilight shook her head. “I can’t let you do that, Bon Bon. It’s far too dangerous.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m the one who captured it before,” I reminded her, “and I’m the one who’s been trained to use this weapon.”
I locked my eyes on the princess, daring her to deny me again.
“She has a point, Twi.”
Twilight looked at Applejack then back at me. “Fine,” she conceded. “Let’s go.”