“So, how’d we do this time?” Dezzy asked, withdrawing a notebook and pencil from her saddlebags.
“Let’s see,” Ditzy said, pulling out a notebook and pencil of her own. “Today’s the 23rd of November, 6 AL,” She checked one of the instruments she had laid out earlier. “You arrived at exactly 13 minutes 6.2 seconds past 1 o’clock in the afternoon.” Both mares wrote this down. “When was our last meeting for you?”
“22nd of April, 7 AL, at 2:33:09.2 in the morning. Sorry about that in advance, by the way.”
Ditzy scribbled this down in her notebook. “Don’t worry about it, I’ll make sure to go to bed early that night.” The two began to examine Ditzy’s instruments. “How’s Sooner doing?”
“Oh, she’s as absorbed in her work as always. She won’t be happy that we only made five months, though; we were expecting at least eight.”
It was at this point that Lyra had finally gathered her wits enough to cut in. “Excuse me, but would one of you please explain what’s going on? Because I am completely lost.”
Ditzy answered. “I’m sorry, Lyra; I’ll explain in detail later, but we only have—” she looked over at her granddaughter for a moment, “—two and a half more minutes before Dezzy gets pulled back to her time, and we need to get these readings down before she leaves.”
“Sorry,” Dezzy added apologetically. “The time machine can only hold me here for a few minutes right now.”
“Oh. Alright then.” Lyra sat down on the grass and watched as the two continued their work. A time machine. She has a time machine. An honest-to-Celestia time machine!
A minute later, the two had finished copying down the readings. Ditzy passed her notebook to Dezzy, who began copying a second set of numbers over to her own.
“She’s copying the departure data,” Ditzy told Lyra. Lyra, still uncertain as to what was happening, said nothing, but nodded in acknowledgement anyway.
“Done,” Dezzy declared, just as one of the devices began ringing. “And, by the sound of it, just in time.” She made her way back into the circle of machines.
“Have a safe trip! Tell Sooner I said hello!”
“Will do! Bye, grandma! Nice to see you again, Ly-“ And with a sudden, blinding flash of light, she was gone.
Lyra immediately turned to the pegasus. “Okay, you need to explain this. Right now.”
-----
“Okay, so let me see if I’ve got this straight.”
Ditzy nodded and gestured for her to go ahead.
“In the future, your granddaughter, Dezzy Doo, alongside Time Turner’s granddaughter…“
“Sooner Former,” Ditzy supplied.
“Right. Dezzy and Sooner get a visit from Sooner’s at-this-point-not-yet-born daughter, who is at this time an earth pony, and she gives them her broken time machine. It only goes backwards in time, can only go backwards a set distance, and only works for a few minutes. And she asks them to fix it, because she needs it to defeat some great evil in her time. Am I right so far?”
“Yep!”
“So as they fix it, using research left to them by Time Turner, Dezzy keeps going further and further back in time. And this goes on until they reach August of 977, where her visit interferes with one of Time Turner’s foalhood experiments, causing a magical accident. And the result of this is what, again?”
“Time turner got sent back in time, earned his cutie mark, and accidentally inspired his younger self to pursue science; I got directly exposed to the time stream and gained my futuresight ability, and the temporal energies released by the event fed back into the time machine’s main engine and gave it that last bit of power it needed to return to full working order.”
“And, now that it’s working, she tells you about all of this, and then travels into the future and gives the machine to Sooner’s daughter. Right?”
Ditzy nodded. “Right.”
“So she does… whatever it is she needs the machine for. And then, she travels back in time and gives the machine, now broken again, to Time Turner. This happens thirty-five years from now. And at some point in all this she has become a FREAKING ALICORN.”
“Mmhm.”
“And he studies the machine, and passes it and his notes down to his son. And he passes them on to Sooner, and she gives the machine to her daughter.”
“That about sums it up.”
“Right. And you have no idea what her name is, what she’s fighting against, or how she ascends?”
“Nope, nope, and nope. The only contact any of us have had with thus far in our own subjective timelines was when she gave Sooner her machine, and she was still an earth pony then. But Turner’s notes say that she’s an alicorn when she brings him the machine, so…”
“Okay.” Lyra glanced around at the myriad of diagrams Ditzy had drawn into the dirt while trying to explain the elaborate series of time loops hers and Time Turner’s families were ensnared in. “One last question.”
“I think I can guess what it is, but go ahead.”
“Who built the time machine? If Time Turner gets it from his great granddaughter, and she gets it from Sooner, and Sooner gets it from Time Turner’s son, and he gets it from Time Turner…”
“Trust me, that question has kept me up for more nights than I’d like to admit. It’s healthier just to not think about it.”
“But… But!”
Ditzy looked Lyra in the eyes as best she could. “Seriously. Just pretend it doesn’t matter. For the sake of your own sanity.”
“Alright.” Lyra leaned back and looked up to the sky, letting out a long breath. “And you deal with this sort of thing on a regular basis?”
“Hey, this is only a couple simple time loops! You should see the sort of craziness that happens when a paradox machine gets involved, or a Turner-Twister device!”
Lyra looked back at the grey mare with an almost pained look. “Do I even want to know what those do?”
“Two words,” she replied with a grin. “Alternate. Timelines.”
Lyra stood up. “That’s it, I’m going home, where things don’t require three different levels of thinking to make sense. Nice to see you, Ditzy.”
“You too; say hi to Bon Bon for me. Oh, and Lyra?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t take the road that goes by Sugar Cube Corner on your way back.”
Lyra cocked her head to the side. “What? Why Not?”
Ditzy gestured to her eyes. “I don’t think Bon Bon would appreciate you getting cake frosting on the carpet.”
“Ah, gotcha. Thanks.”