Broken Symmetry

by Trick Question


Enter Starlight

I froze alongside Twilight, but unlike her I didn't scream. Internally, this surprised me. It's frightening enough to see an injured pony where you don't expect to find one, much less a dead body, much less your own dead body. I figured something about the impossibility of it all protected me psychologically.

The most unsettling thing was that the body resembled me at that exact moment, minus the saddlebags. My body was nude (also without the sweater) except for the cast and rollers strapped on hoof. The cast was on the wrong foot, presumably because my parity had shifted. The backwards writing on the cast supported that theory. My glasses were dangling off of my muzzle. All of the chamber doors were currently shut.

My ears began ringing and I realized my norepinephrine was surging. I started walking forward. I deduced my unconscious mind was pushing me into danger to protect the princess on my right flank. Mentally detached from the situation, I observed myself calmly approaching my own body to inspect it.

"MOONDANCER!" Twilight shouted, after a delay. "You have to get out of here!"

"I'm fine, Twi. I'm right here," I said casually, inspecting my other self. I poked experimentally at my bloodied mane with a hoof, half-expecting it to be a mirage. Closed head injury just behind the horn, an obvious goose-egg of swelling covered by matted hair. Nothing too gory apart from the blood, but any concussion can be deadly. The mane covered up any visible tearing of flesh, but the skull didn't show obvious signs of fracture (at least).

At first I wondered if this was enough blood to "empty" me. It certainly looked like a lot of blood, but a little blood looks like a lot of blood, so I couldn't tell. The fluids had soaked into my mane and dried in small puddles on the floor. My pelt was crusty from it. Everything smelled coppery. I speculated the components of blood having that scent must be achiral. Was it just the iron in the hemoglobin, I wondered? I wasn't sure. The chirality of common scents associated with injury went beyond my current knowledge of pony biology.

"Oh Celestia, we—we have to get you, I mean her, to the hospital!" said Twilight, behind me. I could hear her hooves scrabbling against the metal beneath her as she (presumably) tried to stand up on shaky legs.

I reached under the other Moondancer's foreleg and lifted upward. The front of the body rose like a rigid statue. I was surprisingly heavy, I thought.

"No, we don't. It's already in rigor," I pointed out. I briefly wondered why I had referred to myself as an 'it', but put that in the back of my mind as I set my other self back onto the floor.

Twilight had recovered enough to grab me by the shoulders. "We have to shut the lab down, now," she said. I turned to look at her. She was crying and her forehooves shivered as though she were freezing.

"Obviously. Wait, can you cast the spell?" I asked her.

"What spell?" asked Twilight.

"You know, that spell that lets you view the last few days of a corpse's life as though you're reading a story, remember? The one you were working on?" I said.

"No, no... I haven't finished it yet. We need to get you to the hospital," she repeated.

I turned and looked at the body. It was hurting Twilight, just by being there, even though I was standing here perfectly healthy and safe by her side. I hated this Moondancer for harming my friend. Worse yet, Twilight really wasn't being entirely rational about this whole "dead me" thing.

"Rigor mortis, Twilight! Rigor," I pointed out with another lift of my leg, the rigid body tilting like a pewter figurine. I was starting to feel very angry and I didn't know why. "We can't have two Moondance—no. Twilight, open room one."

"We're leaving now," said Twilight, tugging weakly at my hips.

"Twi, I'm not leaving until you open room one. Don't make me do it, because if I go into one of those rooms, even by mistake, I could end up being her," I said.

"We're not doing any more experiments!"

"Then open the door. I'm not going inside."

Twilight paused for a moment. "Stand outside the doorway," she ordered, and I stood back in the doorway of the anteroom. She trotted over and opened room one, ratcheting the door over the stopper apparatus. The room was empty, as I'd anticipated.

"Watch your flank," I said, as I remotely levitated my lifeless carcass and slid it across the floor with a strong telekinetic shove. I had to use sufficient force to get it past the magic barrier, but the lip on the doorways was negligible.

"Moondancer, wait!" said Twilight, but it was already too late. My body scrunched oddly up into place and then everything disappeared. I held onto the doorway easily, while Twilight slipped halfway into the room from the vacuum pressure. She scrambled back out of the chamber moments later, accidentally sliding the teeth out of the way, and shut the door behind her in the process.

"There," I said. "Now we just have to clean up the blood, and problem solved."

Twilight ran up to me, her muzzle bearing an expression of horror. "Moonie, what did you just do?" she said.

"I disposed of the body," I said. "Look, it's fine. I never liked me anyway," I said, only half-joking.

Twilight Sparkle gave me a strange look, almost like she had no idea who I was. "That was evidence of a murder!" she said. "You just sent evidence of your murder backwards through time!"

"No, I didn't," I said. "Don't you get it yet, Twilight? We're not dealing with time travel of the first or second forms. That wasn't me. That was some other Moondancer from some alternate iteration of this madness. I didn't send it back in time, I sent it to another dimension."

"Wait, what?"

"It's clear what's happening now. Conservation of energy is being violated if the loop isn't perfectly symmetrical, and it isn't. The only way that can be true is if our universe isn't a closed system. Whatever this kind of time travel is, we're connected to other universes in some way we haven't yet been able to interpret. From the perspective of our universe, anything that enters the chamber ceases to exist completely. As far as this world is concerned, each chamber is a disintegrator," I said.

"But why would you do this?" she gasped. "I don't want ANY Moondancer to die!"

"It's too late, Twi! I wanted to get rid of it, okay? Look at you! Look at what it was doing to you!"

"You had no right to—"

"It was my fucking body, Twilight! I had every right!" I shouted.

Twilight looked like she was about to shatter, and I knew I'd gone too far.

"Twi, wait," I said as she pushed past me.

"We have to destroy the lab right now," she said, headed for the stairwell.

I grabbed her from behind, and she fell to the floor and started sobbing. Uncertain of what else to do, I lay there on the floor with her, holding her close. Several minutes passed before she could say anything.

"I can't handle this. I can't handle losing you," she whispered.

I didn't understand this reaction at all. "We've already discussed this, Twilight. Equestria's future takes priority over Moondancer, and we don't know why the other me died yet. I shouldn't be this important to you," I said, and right then I had an idea, one born from the need to escape this awkwardness I felt regarding Twilight Sparkle's attachment to me. "Would you let me do something to help numb your emotions, just so you can think rationally for a moment?"

"I don't want pills," she said softly. "Well... maybe."

"Not pills, but that makes a decent Plan B. It's a spell," I said. "A spell I'm not supposed to know about."

Twilight sighed and sniffled. "Do whatever."

I cast the spell. I'd only ever cast it once before: experimentally, on myself. Twilight sat up and turned to face me. Her face was expressionless, despite the red eyes from crying. She looked disturbingly schizoaffective, and I immediately questioned whether this had been a good idea.

"Moondancer, what did you do to me?" she asked, her voice devoid of passion.

"I temporarily neutralized your emotional state," I said. "More specifically, I've separated your emotional state from your cognition to the point where it won't interfere with your decision-making abilities. I'll write the spell down for you if you need it later."

"This shouldn't be possible," said Twilight. "Wait while I clean myself up." She walked into the bathroom. I grabbed a piece of parchment from the desk and transcribed the spell.

Twilight returned with a washed face which still bore no discernible expression. It was certainly more unnerving to see the effects on another pony than it was to see them on myself, but that's probably because when I'd originally seen the effects on myself (in the mirror) I was under the effect of the spell. I cursed not realizing the existence of that lens. I should have known this spell was more dangerous than it had appeared to me subjectively.

"Maybe this was a bad idea," I said, but I hoofed her the spell anyway.

"I don't understand why I haven't heard of this spell before," said Twilight, almost robotically, as she studied the parchment.

"I think it's proscribed."

"You shouldn't legally be casting it?"

"That's what proscribed means. Actually, I think knowledge of the spell might even be a crime. It's a long story how I found it, but the short version is it was in the Star Swirl the Bearded wing of the Royal Canterlot Library, in an area scheduled to be archived somewhere private. I don't have access to that part of the library, of course, but this was a long time ago when I was visiting with a study group with special permission. When I saw it, I memorized it on the spot before anypony could catch me looking through the materials."

Twilight paused for a moment, calculating. "This is fine. I should have the legal authority to use the spell, and I won't tell Princess Celestia about it for the time being. How long does it last for?"

"From what I understand, it lasts until voluntarily cancelled by the subject, though there's probably a maximum time limit of less than a week. I can attest that it continues to work when you're unconscious," I explained.

"How do you know that?"

"Because I've used it on myself, as an experiment. Only once, though. Um, it was when you missed my birthday party," I said, then looked nervously down at my hooves.

"Oh," said Twilight, flatly.

"I ended up cancelling the spell after about eighteen hours. Waking up without emotional motivation was disturbing enough to give me an indication as to why this spell might be proscribed," I said, hoping Twi would take the hint.

"Well, I believe this is useful. I can think much more clearly," said Twilight. "I'll maintain the effect until we've resolved this issue, then cancel it afterwards."

I sighed. "Okay, fine. So let's destroy the lab so we can get you back to normal."

"No," said Twilight. "We can't destroy the lab yet."

"Wait, what? You were gung-ho on destroying the lab right before I cast the spell!" Oh, horseshit, I thought.

"I know. But with my head clear of these 'feelings' I can see that what you said was correct. There's no reason for me to be concerned about your death because we already know the loops aren't symmetrical," she said. "Currently, room three is serving as a failsafe: it's never been used for an experiment. That means we could send a message backwards through time to the very beginning when you first activated the rooms, and prevent this entire situation from starting. That would almost certainly save our lives in an alternate universe."

"You mean one of us could go back in time to stop it," I said.

"No. That would be unacceptable," said Twilight. "Like you said, from the perspective of our universe, each chamber is a disintegrator. Unless we have proof that a second alive-and-well Twilight or Moondancer currently exists in this dimension, it wouldn't be right to send one of us away from it. Additionally, if the goal is to stop the program entirely, whoever goes back in time would end up being in a universe where there are two copies of that pony, which is far from ideal."

"Look Twi, I was maybe talking out of my mark when I said some of that," I admitted. "Until we have a theory that can predict what comes out of a chamber, we can't assume that dimensional travel is actually happening. There must be a causal connection between this universe and any universe that precedes it, and while I can clearly see the forward link I can't predict the backward one."

"I have a theory about that. I need to do some research to confirm the mathematics will hold, but I should be able to accomplish it by nightfall. If the math checks out, we can run a simple set of experiments with rooms zero or one. Based on the results of those experiments, we can decide whether or not to activate the failsafe."

"But how would we activate the failsafe without using a pony to do it?" I asked.

"Not hard. We can build a robot capable of waiting until the field first turns on, and program it to cause enough damage to draw attention to that room, by either nullifying the field or otherwise affecting the measurements. This would ensure you open room three first, at which point you would find the robot and a written message it carries telling you to destroy the lab," Twilight explained.

"And then after we send that robot, we can destroy the lab in this dimension," I said. "Although I still have no idea how my backer will react."

"Moondancer, you mentioned that you sent messages to your backer, yes?" asked Twilight. "How exactly did you send messages?"

"Oh, right. I do that through the bank," I said. "I would send back one bit by wire transfer to whomever claimed the sender's identity, and include a detailed message with the transaction. Of course, I can't prove the right pony got it, but it's a fair bet that CPXXXXX is unique. Fortunately the bank is cool with it, probably because they're taking a cut of millions of bits in transfer."

"Interesting," said Twilight. "I wonder who CP could be. Celestial Princess? I don't think we should tell Princess Celestia what we know until we have more information. Rarity has a friend and coworker named Coco Pommel in Manehattan, but she wouldn't have access to that kind of funding."

"CP-symmetry breaking?" I asked, raising a brow.

"Implausible," said Twilight. "Why would anypony fund you to do research that they already knew was going to break CP-symmetry?"

"I dunno, just brainstorming here," I admitted.

"Let's break for now. We shouldn't attempt to contact your backer until we know what our full plan of action will be. I'll do research to flesh out my theory on what I assume must be time travel of the third form. If I'm correct, it would make sense that this kind of thing would be forbidden."

"It makes sense that the spell you're under is forbidden, too. I'm worried, Twi. Please don't leave that spell on for long, okay? Emotions can be inconvenient, but they're an important aspect of proper decision-making when it comes to ethical choices and moral consequence," I pointed out.

"Okay. I'll only keep it up for as long as absolutely necessary," said Twilight in a disturbingly flat tone of voice.

Unfortunately, I no longer trusted Twilight's judgment to make that call. Apart from arranging a meeting with Princess Celestia, which neither of us wanted to do at that point, I wasn't left with any safe options. I couldn't force the spell out of her without taking time to engineer a counterspell, and that would take longer than the spell's natural duration. I just had to hope that Twilight would act reasonably.

In the back of my mind, I had this awful feeling that my death no longer mattered to her. Even if it was for the best, I still didn't like it.

On the other hoof, I didn't like myself enough to disagree.


I headed back to Twilight's place to do some research of my own on the dress. This was the only currently parity-flipped object I still had access to, because I didn't know what Twilight had done with the shopping list. I assume she had transcribed the list backwards, probably by writing it down before going back in time again, and taking it with her through the chamber—so the writing would be forwards but the paper reversed. I'd briefly considered stealing other-me's glasses before disintegrating the beast, but I figured (on a primal emotional level, one my friend did not currently possess) that that would have been like beating a dead horse. I might have hated my corpse but it wasn't appropriate for me to use myself as a piñata.

For all I knew, I had used myself as a piñata already, hence the corpse. Who could say? A room where anything can come out is a scary thing to open. I was tempted to destroy the place without Twilight, but I couldn't. Even if she wasn't thinking sanely, we were still a team.

On my way back to the house, I bumped into Twilight's mother, Twilight Velvet. I didn't recognize her until she started talking to me (the family resemblance is pretty strong, fortunately).

"Moondancer? Could I talk with you a moment?" she asked, walking alongside me as I headed toward Twilight's old home with the dress in tow. She had a deep look of worry on her face.

"Yeah, sure. What's up?" I asked, already fearing any answer.

Twilight Velvet reached out and stopped me with a hoof. "It's about Twilight Sparkle. My daughter has been... well, she's been very emotional lately."

"I've noticed," I said, lacking anything not-stupid to say in its place. Granted, the exact opposite was true now, but presumably Velvet was referring to further back than ten minutes ago.

She nodded. "I'm very concerned about her. She's been staying with us rather than at the castle, I presume because she's trying to avoid somepony, possibly Princess Celestia. Originally she was acting so distant emotionally I could hardly recognize her as my daughter, but last night she was drinking, which I've also never known her to do, and crying her eyes out," she said, her voice barely a whisper. "She won't say more than a few words to me about it, and she won't eat dinner with us. She looks very unhealthy. I was tempted to call for a nurse, and I will if she stays with us another night. I was hoping you'd know something about this?"

I winced. "Ah, geez. Yeah, I know she's been going through a lot of stuff lately."

"It isn't my place to get involved," said Twilight Velvet, violating her own logic in the span of a single sentence, "but I know you're close to her. She cares very much for you, Moondancer, and she seems to think she's let you down in some terrible way. She hasn't said anything about it to me, but a mother knows."

I nodded slowly. "Yeah. We've both been kind of emotional lately," I said, trying to straddle the fine line between keeping Sparkle's confidence and helping her cope. "We've been working on some research together and I was injured, which she blames herself for a little, for one. There's... well, more, but it's complicated."

Twilight Velvet tapped a hoof to my muzzle, which irritated me slightly, but I did my best to hide it. "Say no more," she said. "The details aren't important. I just want you to know that your friend is hurting, and anything you can do to alleviate this suffering, perhaps by talking it out with her, would lift a tremendous weight from an old mare's withers." (She didn't look old, but I presumed that was simple self-deprecating exaggeration used to establish rapport within a narrow time-window such as this one.)

I took in a deep breath. "I'll talk to her about it. We've already been talking about her feelings, and she hasn't stopped confiding in me, so I expect things to improve soon," I said, then paused for a moment. "I like her too. Er, as a friend. A good friend, I mean." I felt my cheeks flush.

"Thank you," she said, and she seemed relieved. Then she gave me a hug (before I could protest the physical contact) and trotted off.

Ugh. I did not want to reopen Twilight's wounds anytime soon, but her mom was right. We really needed to talk about a lot of things. The kiss, for one. That conversation was undoubtedly going to suck, but it was a necessary bandage to rip off. At least I could put it off until she recovered from the effects of my spell. Plus, I was pretty sure Twilight told me she was staying at the castle—so was she lying to me, or was she frequenting both her parents' home and the castle? There was no way to know without talking to her.

After I got 'home' (which more and more Twilight's old place was starting to feel like, to me), it took me about a half-hour to relax enough before I could start my research. I was buzzing from my twin overdoses of drugs and emotional pain. After a brief meal and half a pain pill I felt well enough to numb my heart with some serious, sedulous science. The half-hour was enough time to run my sweater through the drier, so I had another warm and psychological comfort to hug me as I worked. I almost felt normal again, excepting the cast.

I tried to take a shortcut to begin with. I was able to modify an existing spell to detect aberrations of intrinsic angular momentum, and I cast it on the dress. Oddly enough, there was no signature. The dress was definitely parity-flipped (it still had the odd scent, or lack thereof). This indicated that either my spell didn't work (a very likely case given the degree of adaptation and lack of testing), or else the parity change extended only to the molecular level.

I assumed that my spell didn't work, because otherwise the result made no sense. If something was parity-flipping the contents of the field between universes, the intrinsic angular momenta of the individual particles would need to be affected. Intrinsic angular momentum is a true parity feature, well-established in physics. The weak force is the only force which breaks parity-symmetry, as well as the only force which breaks CP-symmetry (charge and parity combined). Parity-flipped matter should behave in some fundamental sense "similarly" to antimatter, in that it would be stable, but quantum effects related to nuclear decay would slightly disfavor its production.

So I attempted to confirm my suspicions that the spell was flawed. Fortunately, I had a more scientific method for testing particle parity available to me: a small bangbox I keep with me in my saddlebags. I set the vacuum up, then pressed the hem of the dress against the input terminus of the bangbox in order to feed it atomic material (I could control the input finely enough to ensure it didn't draw in material from the air by mistake). I filtered out everything from the sample except for a hoofful of atoms of radioactive Carbon-14 which were easy enough to rip out of the phospholipid residues in the material.

I considered it unlikely that the electrons in the dress had not largely migrated to surrounding material (although even that is a bizarre thought, because one doesn't normally encounter electrons that differ from one another in any way at all and so there isn't a "this electron" or "that electron" to speak of in the first place). However, the atomic nuclei should have remained consistent even with quantum perturbations in play, as only those perturbations associated with the weak force could cause the particles to flip and (as the name sort of implies) the weak interaction doesn't come up in a constant fashion for stable matter. In particular, I made the assumption that Carbon-14 in the dress was primordial with respect to the dress's manufacture. This is a safe assumption because virtually all Carbon-14 in a common organic material should have been produced by intake of Carbon-14 through the food web, and production would cease afterwards. If those Carbon-14 nuclei had not themselves been produced through nuclear decay of unexpected heavy elements in the dress, they should retain the parity flip at the particle level (even as dynamic of a place that a nucleus is, because none of the strong force interactions which roil the nucleus could affect the parity of its constituent quarks and temporary mesons).

While the theory is far from sacrosanct, it is fully expected that the decay of Carbon-14 is mediated by the weak interaction. This suggests that the decay of a parity-flipped Carbon-14 nucleus would produce the wrong-hoofed fermions (hoofedness being determined by its representation in the Ponicaré group, as evidenced by the 'static' helicity of the particle in a massless frame). This would necessarily leave a telltale signature in the bangbox trace whenever a parity-flipped Carbon-14 atom decayed.

In laypony's terms: if the particles were flipped, rather than just the molecules, radioactive Carbon-14 decays from the dress's atoms would yield a telltale signature in the bangbox.

While I waited for results, I spent a couple of hours researching details on weak symmetry-breaking. I was unable to come up with any theory that would allow for a molecular parity shift without causing a corresponding change to the angular momenta of the atomic nuclei. I was, however, able to determine with high certainty that magic could theoretically be used reverse the parity of a quantity of matter (or antimatter) without affecting the subatomic level (I even had some ideas on how to do this), but this should not be an effect of a field that operated on the individual particles. Unless, that is, somepony cast a parity-reversing spell directly into the field itself, which was clearly an absurd proposition.

Then it finally happened: I caught two Carbon-14 decays. Both of them were completely normal. That was very compelling evidence that the parity of the individual particles hadn't been flipped.

It simply made no sense. There was no way anything in nature could reverse the parity of an object at the chemical level, but not the subatomic level. Only a magic spell could do something like that.

I was sitting on the sofa by the bookcase with several books in my lap, deep in thought when Twilight entered. It was nightfall already, which kind of surprised me (time flies when you're working) but it matched when I'd expected her back.

Right away, I noticed something weird. She was wearing her forelock tied up the same way I do. For a moment I wondered if she were making fun of me, but that seemed highly unlike her. Her face was mostly expressionless, but it was clear to me she didn't have the spell up anymore. Something about her body also seemed "off" to me.

"What's up?" I asked, quickly standing up and spilling books all over the floor in the process.

"Oh, um, not much. So I did my research, and I think we should go destroy the lab right now. There isn't an improved chance of helping another Equestria by sending a message backward," she said.

Twilight was lying. I was terrible at reading ponies, but for some reason I felt a primal connection to her mental state, and I knew her in some deeply intuitive sense. Everything on her face was a red flag. She didn't even look like herself with the forelock tied back. She looked more like a broken version of me, like I was staring blurrily into a mirror with my glasses off.

"Moondancer?" she asked nervously when I didn't respond. I snapped back to reality, but froze. Wasn't Starlight Glimmer a laureate mage?

I turned and pulled a specific book off of the shelf with magic and threw it to her in an underhoof arc. "Here," I said.

"What's this?" she said, catching it deftly in her left hoof. I was more than a little surprised she didn't use magic, but I'd thrown it perfectly to her left flank.

"Read the cover out loud," I ordered. She looked at the book. It was written in Arabic, a language I knew Twilight had studied in school. Even with my limited high-school Arabic knowledge I could read the cover, but you'd need to at least know some Arabic to have a chance (the alphabet is too unusual, by comparison).

"Oh, I'm sorry... my Saddle Arabic is really rusty," she said, grimacing.

"Yeah, right. Read it. Now," I said. I could see perspiration forming on her brow.

"Let's see. This must be '1001 Arabian Nights'?" she said, tilting the book at an angle. It was a reasonable guess. That book was also in this library. But it was a wrong guess. That was the reason I had chosen this book, in particular.

I immediately tossed up a bubble shield around my body. "Who are you, really?" I asked, though I already knew the answer.

Twilight Sparkle looked shocked for several moments, then her face relaxed, and finally broke into a smirk. Her horn flashed, and her wings disappeared. She still looked (and sounded) like Twilight Sparkle wearing her forelock up, but now she appeared to be a normal unicorn. "Oh, Moondancer. Why did you have to give it away so quickly?" she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. "Now I don't have any reason to let you live."

"You won't be able to break through my shield without effort," I stated. "While you do, I'll cast a spell to magnify my voice and shout for the guard." I wasn't bluffing, but I didn't think I was likely to walk away from this encounter either.

Wingless Twilight sighed and shook her head. "You stupid mare. If I wanted you dead, you'd already be dead. I could destroy that shield in a fraction of a second," she bragged. "I'm actually trying to do you a favor. You've already learned that these time cycles are quirky, to put it mildly. Whatever caused you to go back in time and croak is still a probable future for you. Destroy the lab now and it can't happen. There isn't any other experiment running aside from those four rooms you constructed, minus the one I smashed, because I don't have the funding or magilectric power source to reproduce it—yet. Simply terminating the magilectric flow to those rooms immediately and permanently severs your tie with the past, thereby saving your life."

I paused in thought, clenching my jaw as I maintained my shield at full strength. "If you want the lab destroyed that's all the justification I need to keep it running," I said. "Whatever you're in Canterlot to do can't be good for Equestria."

Twilight rolled her eyes. "Oh spare me. Noble little Moondancer, so eager to sacrifice her life for the betterment of Equestria. Give me a bucking break," she said, and made a gagging motion with one hoof. "You lack the ability to even begin to comprehend the magnitude of what I've had to sacrifice for Equestria."

"You shut up. Twilight's told me all about your scheme for revenge. You're the Starlight Glimmer copy who didn't get reformed," I said, throwing my cards on the table. I had a clever goal in mind, however. Psychologically speaking, the fastest way to extract information from an unwilling target is to tell them information that is possibly false, as they'll have a strong drive to correct you (unless they're a complete psychopath, which I understood Starlight wasn't). For example, if you want to know if somepony is married, the fastest way to find out is not to ask, "Are you married?", which they could choose to rebuff, but, "How's your wife doing?", for which virtually no unmarried pony would reply with anything other than, "I'm not married".

"I don't know what freaky brand of screwed-up mind-altering spell Twilight put on my double to make her give up on her dreams, but it doesn't matter. She isn't going to get the chance to do it to me," she revealed. "You idiots should both know better than to keep an experiment this dangerous running. My only concern is the danger it represents to me personally, but go ahead and kill yourself all over again! See if I give an donkey's ass," she said, with a chuckle.

Then I noticed something. She definitely wasn't a psychopath, because I could tell she was scared. It was very subtle, but I was watching her face like a hawk, and I saw the confidence fade from her eyes at that very moment.

"Are you going to leave, or are we going to do this?" I asked, not at all prepared to 'do this'.

"Like I said. It's your life, or lack thereof," she mumbled, then cast a spell that returned her wings (or removed the illusion of Twilight not having wings, rather—which I assumed was harder to maintain than the magic producing the general disguise). "Be damn sure to tell Twilight I was here, by the way. She'll know exactly what that means." She walked backwards to the doorway and exited, shutting it behind her.

I waited half a minute before dropping the shield and falling onto the sofa, completely exhausted and shaken by the experience. For some reason I wasn't frightened, however. She was right about one thing, after all: with a disguise that convincing, Starlight Glimmer could have easily murdered me without me being aware of it. But for some strange reason, I had a feeling that she was actually afraid of me.

I had to figure out why, before it was too late.