What is required is a rethinking of the whole strategy.
What is required is more friendship. And by friendship I meant experiments and studies and thinking.
Twilight looked outside her library window. She had lived in this place for an accumulative... 63 years, and is soon going to celebrate the 64-th anniversary. She had tried to keep a complete chronology in her head, but lost interest in such a thing. Continuity of a personal history is not that important when it’s quite clear that there’s something suspicious about the whole “continuity” thing, so she settled for keeping a few numbers in her memory, just enough to provide a comforting sense of continuity, but not enough to burden her mind.
She felt tired and weary, felt not in the mood of acting her age. Actually, I am going to be the oldest pony soul, in fifty years or so. Other than the princesses, nopony has ever lived longer than 200 years.
“Twily?”
“Hello, Fluttershy.” Twilight replied, her gaze still fixed on the gray skies outside the window.
“I bought some salad and pasta for tonight, and um... You look... sad.” Fluttershy put down the shopping bag on the kitchen table and came behind Twilight, “Is there anything wrong?”
“Nothing, I’m just reminiscing. Of times long gone past.”
“What times?” Fluttershy sat beside Twilight and followed her gaze.
“Just... times. I don’t even know how they came. I guess the gray sky reminded me of the day we went to the northern mountain to talk to the sleeping dragon.” Twilight pointed at the snow-capped peak in the north, “Remember that time? It feels so long ago.”
“It’s just...” Fluttershy counted on her hoof, “Four, no, five years ago, Twilight.”
“Is it? But it feels longer for me.” And it is not just a feeling.
So they sat together and reminisced about the past times.
It was after dinner when Twilight decided to cut her nightly studies short. After she started dating Fluttershy, she had chosen Old Pegasian Language as her main study project, since pegasus culture just got a lot more interesting for her. The end of the study was not in sight, but she was making steady progress.
Instead of studying the Old Pegasian declension system, she opted to simply go out for a walk with Fluttershy.
“Consider. Fluttershy. Do you believe in reincarnation?”
“I usually don't think about such things, Twilight. If I am reincarnated, I certainly don't remember what happened last time, so it makes no difference.”
“But what if this is the first life of yours?”
“Well, nopony remembers their previous life, are they all in their first life?”
“Yes of course. I know all that. It's just making conversation.” Twilight looked upward. “But if there's a next life, would you want to stay with me again?”
“Yes, though I can't make decisions for my next life.”
Twilight tried to say something poignant, but realized that the only thought inside her was something to the line of “If we blow this up, I can just try again next life.” and that disappointed her deeply, somehow.
Is it disappointment about this nonchalance? It can't be. This nonchalance is not my fault. It's just how things work: if things fail to go my way, I can always fix it next time. Romance is no longer a scarce resource, friendship is no longer a scarce resource, nothing much is scarce for me, because life itself is no longer a scarce resource.
Maybe it's just the ghost of my long-dead desire for true understanding. No pony can truly understand the loneliness of Twilight Sparkle, the time-traveler, for they might as well live in a different world from mine.
After a pause, Twilight chose the safest response, “Well, that is true. More reason for us to cherish this life.”
And as expected, Fluttershy smiled and nodded. Twilight studied her face carefully from the corner of her eyes while pretending to look at the moon, assessing if Fluttershy had been sufficiently pleased with this dialogue, and whether new dialogue options had been unlocked.
In the story of Macbeth, a classic tragedy by Shaken Pearls, a general, goaded by her husband, murders her queen to take the throne herself. Then they become paranoid and murder more and more ponies in order to stay on the throne. Eventually the husband suicides due to guilt, and Macbeth is killed in battle by the daughter of the ex-queen.
Now, it would be hard to adopt this play for me. To begin with, Equestria has two queens, or princesses. Second, I'm not a general, but a student of one of the queens. Third, nopony would play the role of the husband. Maybe Rarity will do the role just fine, but so far, all routes that leads to marrying Rarity would end with her business running smoothly, and then she would not have sufficient ambition to play the role of my murderous spouse.
Hamlet would work even less. Celestia's sister is already a queen, there's no reason for her to usurp. and I'm not Celestia's daughter. And there's no way in Tartarus I can make it so that Luna marry my father. Yup, doesn't work.
Romeo and Juliet... No. There's no family feud I can think of among ponies I know.
Doctor Faust... Well, I am a scholar who has a lot of disillusionment and desire for drama as opposed to powerless knowledge, but where am I going to find Mephistopheles? I can... just make my own take on the play.
Twilight sat on her bed in the dank cell, replaying scenes from her life in her head. She left the plain-boiled broccoli and cauliflower untouched on the bench. It tasted alright, but she knew hunger let her thoughts wander more lightly. With measured words, she was whispering toward an imaginary panel of literary critics.
“And I do believe that the part where I escaped from the guards was good, but I probably over-highlighted my recklessness when I sacrificed Spike to keep them off my trail. Now that I think about it, I might have overplayed the entire concept of 'sacrificing everything in pursuit of knowledge'. Studying the nature of the elements through lethal medical experiments might be understandable, given that the protagonist genuinely believes that it is fundamental to the survival of Equestria, but to do so without any attempt at ensuring her subjects are subjected to the minimal possible pain just seems unmotivated. Although in light of the fact that I am trying to be dramatic, the lack of realism should be at least excusable.
However, overdramatization is not the main problem that plagued my play. Rather, it was the reverse. At quite a few scenes did I fail to emote properly, the most gratuitous instance of which is the first experiment scene. I was supposed to be doing the experiment for the first time, and as such, I ought to have been nervous, amateurish, and make a gory mess, followed by a hasty cleanup and weeks of forced composure and guilt-ridden soliloquies. Instead, I was too calm, too smooth. Nopony suspected a thing – which made the rest of the play easier to perform, but it still blemishes the realism.”
She paused to hear a question raised by the critics.
“My conjecture is that I'm emotionally oversaturated after preparing and rehearsing this play for an extended time. Writing the script was easy, but rehearsing took me at least six, seven lives before I cut out all the impractical parts and finalize the script, and after rehearsing for about thirty years, I might be excused if my emotive ability failed me from time to time.”
She paused and bowed.
“Thank you, and for my next production, instead of another epic tragedy, I will consider one that is more light-hearted. I could do a rerun of the Lady and the Trump, or maybe try developing a new play with Pinkie Pie – ”
Twilight was broken out of her thoughts by a harsh yank on her chained collar.
“Sorry, it's the cue for the final scene. We'll continue later?”
Twilight was walked out of the dungeon to an elevated platform in the castle courtyard. The executioner was waiting. Tradition held that the executioner must have dark red coat, so that the blood does not stain their coat visibly. Beside the executioner stood the executioner's scribe.
“Does the condemned wish to speak any last words?”
“All the world's a stage, and all the mares and colts merely players. I see how a conversation ends before it starts, and the only function of it would be ritualistic enactment, like performing a play...” Twilight laid her head on the block, “I saw it would end this way before it began. I regret nothing.”
The executioner's scribe wrote down the words as Twilight spoke, then she wrote down the reaction of the crowd as Twilight's head bounced out of the basket and rolled around its horntip, like a cone rolling around its apex.