Quantum Vault

by WishyWish

5.1 - Butterfly Bubblegum on my Hooves

July 12, 2015

Ponyville

Sunday

Quantum didn’t have anything on her stomach. But that didn’t stop her from dry-heaving into the bushes.

She came up with the taste of bile in her throat three minutes later. Sitting back and placing a hoof on her stomach, she willed the involuntary undulations to cease until she could collect herself and take in her surroundings.

Sun. Country air. Open spaces.

The new scenery was a stark, jarring contrast from the perpetually gloomy skies of Baltimare, and it took twice as long as normal for her eyes to adjust to the bright light of the afternoon. She felt her muzzle to make certain her interphased glasses were still there, sighing with relief when she found them. Quantum hadn’t forgotten Hal’s warning – if the glasses ever left her possession, they would not only be visible to others but could be destroyed. Considering there was no way to replace them, she wasn’t too keen on being condemned to perpetual nearsightedness. Her second priority was the leg pouch with the C.A.S. emblem that was subject to the same rules, and still contained the small, twenty-thousand year old computer pad within. Satisfied that everything was where it was supposed to be, she rose to her hooves, stretched her aching legs and back, and drank up the warm, energizing rays of the sun. She fluttered her eyelids and found herself nose to nose with the muzzle of another pony.

Yelping with shock, Quantum sprang back and adopted a fight or flight posture, determined to identify this newcomer – or at least discern if they were a threat – before they had a chance to act.

The minty mare blinked. So did the milk-chocolate brown stallion she was looking at. He matched her every move perfectly until Quantum realized, much to her embarrassment, that she was looking into a jagged shard of mirrored glass that was propped up against the side of a building. She got up close to the reflection and began pulling at her eyerims, flaring her nostrils, and checking her teeth.

“A stallion again?” She mused aloud. “Am I gonna have to woo the queen of Saddle Arabia this time or something?”

Remembering the lessons Hal taught her about her gait, she pranced about for a few practice steps and examined her reflection. Her host had a spikey earth pony mane a shade darker than his coat, a pair of cobalt blue eyes, and of all things, a green tie hanging from a white collar. She made a series of faces in the mirror – everything from stern steadfastness to silly lollygagging, just to see which one looked the best on the stallion that stared back.

It took a good ten minutes before it dawned on Quantum that a jagged pane of glass propped up against a building was a strange excuse for a mirror. Tilting her head at the carelessly discarded and potentially dangerous thing, she looked up and discovered that the entire building, probably once a small home, was in similar condition. There were large holes throughout the structure with singed ends and skeletal remnants of furniture that suggested a raging fire had consumed most of the place. There were a few stains here and there of various colors and consistencies. Lifting her glasses and leaning in to get a close look, she squinted and identified each in turn.

Rust.

Paint.

Blood.

Her brows creased. She stepped out from the building and into the town proper. The sight that awaited her sent her jaw straight into the scorched grass.

Quantum remembered this place. Two vaults ago, when she had taken up residence in the body of the matron of Sweet Apple Acres, this square had been the center of Ponyville – the little hamlet in the countryside she’d never before visited that had a habit for churning out ponies who were destined to save the world. The place her mother, Trixie Lulamoon, always told her awful stories about. Stories she didn’t really believe. Until now.

To call the village ‘ruined’ would have been an understatement. A fountain that sat in the center of the square, reduced to hunks of scarred concrete, ran muddy brown with a thick pollutant Quantum cared not to identify. Deep ruts had been gouged from the earth in places, such that they reminded the minty mare of a novel she once read about alien invaders that had blown holes in cities with orbital bombardment. Burnt haystacks mingled with overturned vegetable carts that were laying among half eaten produce left to rot in the sun.

Everywhere she looked, Quantum saw only one thing.

Canterlot.

“H-Hal…?” The minty mare swallowed, taking a few steps back from the carnage. “Hal…what is all this…? Hal?”

Only a pattering of raindrops on her muzzle and a stray, black leaf that had fluttered down from a dead tree replied. Quantum looked up to find that she had backed into a single raincloud, which was now matting her seagreen mane with drizzle. It was a bright, shiny day overhead – complete with fluffy white clouds, dark rainy clouds, and frigid clouds dumping snow in random places that was turning into puddles before it hit the grass.

“W-what in…?” Quantum closed her eyes and forced herself to take a deep breath. “Stop…stop this, Quantum. Relax,” she told herself aloud, “you have to relax. You saw a tsunami rip apart an entire civilization twenty-thousand years ago. Ghost ponies are out to get you, you passed yourself off as a stallion, saved Equestria from an apple famine, beat a card shark at his own game…you can handle this.”

Quantum opened her eyes. And again there was Canterlot. Everywhere her sapphire eyes dared to stray, the burnt hay and cracked wood were eroded masonry and black shadows of vaporized greenery. The produce carts were bleached bodies lying in the sun, and the incessant rattling of dry branches in the breeze was the howling laughter of Trixie Lulamoon. Twenty thousand years ago, a civilization that was not Quantum’s died. But this was her Equestria. Her Canterlot.

Her crime.

Quantum screamed.

Kicking up dust on her heels and without destination, the minty mare fled across a partially destroyed stone bridge that presided over a river of sludge. The carnage followed her, giving her no quarter. She begged the hallucinations to end, her vision hazing with tears until she impacted with something soft but solid enough to send her flying in the direction she had come. Landing on her back with a yelp, Quantum scrambled up to a sitting position and rubbed her head, adrenaline dissipating from her brain until rational thought began to return.

She looked up and found that she was not alone.

Another pony was there. Or at least, it looked like a pony. It was about the size and shape of a pony, with a flowing well-kept mane of bubblegum and pastel pink that was stark contrast to the bushy, wild curls of its tail. Its coat was predominantly pale yellow with soft pink blotches – or maybe it was pink with yellow blotches. Quantum couldn’t be sure, but the mottled coloring spread over its entire body, making it hard to determine where one color ended and the other began. Its eyes seemed to swirl and shift between hues of blue and green entirely on their own. The strange pony was grinning broadly, and it had its attention focused solely on Quantum. Its cutie mark depicted a random assortment of butterflies and balloons.

“Heebieee~” The curious pony emitted a noise through its teeth that sounded like a giggle…sort of. Its grin broadened to the point that it outpaced even the most excited foal on Hearthswarming’s Eve.

“H-hello?” Quantum ventured.

“Hello!” The pony, seemingly a mare by its general shape and tone of voice, quite literally bounced over to the minty mare on its hooves as if it were a rabbit. “Hello hello!”

Quantum wasn’t sure if the pony was returning her greeting or just blindly repeating her words. “Yeah, um…hello,” she raised a brow as the pony began to lick its hoof like a cat grooming itself. “Are you…okay? What happened here?”

“Shypie!” The pony exclaimed, returning immediately to its grooming.

“…what?”

“Shypie!” The curious mare repeated. It then took up Quantum’s foreleg in its own and made as if to lick her too. The minty mare pulled away.

“Um, no…no thanks,” she said, as politely as she could manage. “Shy…pie? Is that your name?”

“Shypie! Heebieee~~” Seemingly pleased, the earth pony bounced in place and grinned that same grin that made her look like a jack-o-lantern covered in pink and yellow paint. Before Quantum could get another word in, the colorful mare thrust out her hoof. Resting atop it was a single, blooming daisy. “Kindness!” The mare cried.

Quantum tilted her head at the spectacle. The hoof was waggled in her face so many times that she finally took to reaching out for the little flower – she remembered that the image of herself she’d seen moments before was clearly that of an earth stallion, and thus perhaps it was better she take the offering with her teeth rather than magic. “Thank—”

The mare’s other forehoof came down hard on the flower, so fast that Quantum barely had time to get her muzzle out of the way before Shypie crushed the tip of it. The colorful pony mooshed the flower between her forehooves, grinding and squashing it like putty until it fell to the grass in a mess of pollen and green stains.

“Laughter!” Shypie sang. Apparently deciding the conversation was over, the bizarre creature turned and began hopping down the street in long vaults.

“Hey! Wait!” Quantum favored the murdered flower with a final glance and left it there, scrambling to catch up to the mare that had killed it so gleefully. “Stop! What’s going on here!? Don’t just leave!”

The pursuit continued for a good ten minutes. Quantum’s poor heart was spared the time necessary to take in more of the shattered surroundings, but her lungs eventually failed her and left her leaning on the side of a building, panting to refill them with oxygen. She watched the victorious Shypie leap out of sight, her vaults having not decreased in the slightest even after a spirited chase.

“What in Equestria was that all about?” The minty mare mused aloud. “What was she?”

Quantum scanned the area and found it to look very much like any other part of town she’d seen in terms of destruction. A coldness shambled down her spine, and despite the warmth of the season, she wrapped her forelegs around herself and shivered. She began checking the burnt out husks for some building that was still structurally sound enough to provide some escape from the ghosts all around. Her search did not take long.

Her ears perked as she stepped warily across the threshold of one such structure. There was a noise within. A white noise, like humming from a generator. Curiosity took her – Quantum hadn’t seen any such technology in Ponyville during her brief stay with the Apples, but then, for all she knew she could be far in the future. Or the past.

Suddenly she was a filly in a candy store.

The building she had entered was alive with technology from a number of different disciplines. There were wooden lab tables outfitted with beakers and chemistry equipment, goggles and torches for welding, and machines with numeric readouts that were adorned with complex pulley systems. The humming was coming from tesla coils arcing power between them, electric lightbulbs, and a curious cylindrical container bolted to the floor that held a suspension liquid contained behind glass. Quantum took note of the fact that it was curiously empty, but her eyes strayed away and her thoughts quickly turned to the model airplanes and myriad ticking clocks hanging from the ceiling.

“This…” she marveled, feeling dwarfed by it all until a genuine fillygrin split her cheeks, “…this is awesome! I could build another Accelerator with all this if it weren’t so…so…” Her brow furrowed as she poked at a few vacuum tubes arranged on a nearby stool. “…so archaic. I haven’t seen tech like this since I was making potato clocks in primary school.”

“You’re not far off,” a familiar voice commented. There was a momentary, familiar flash of white light, and Quantum turned to find Hal stifling a yawn. His busy frosted manetips were ungroomed, there were bags under his eyes, and his wings were on auto pilot, causing him to hover in place lazily. “It took forever to triangulate your position this time,” he complained. “We were up all night. Couldn’t you, I dunno...vault into somepony who’s in the middle of a good night’s sleep or something?”

Quantum didn’t even try to return the quip. “What’s happening? Where am I? What’s going on!? Why does it look like everything blew up?!” The fear and exhaustion were so prevalent in her eyes that Hal instantly regretted his words.

“Cutie, calm down,” he commanded. “I’ll tell you what I know so far, but what’s gotten into you? You look like you’ve seen the Headless Horse.”

“I just…” Quantum faltered, her brain still overlaying images of a future Canterlot over the Ponyville of today. She took a deep breath and shook her head from side to side so hard she had to adjust her glasses afterwards. “Just…forget it. Hooves in the game. Tell me what you’ve got for me.”

Hal quirked a brow and made a face, but digressed. He slid the colorful, well-lit device that looked like a television remote out of his pocket protector and started booping away with a hoof. “You’re in Ponyville again. The year is 2015. Sometime in…summer it looks like.”

Quantum glanced around at all of the equipment and instantly understood why it looked the way it did. In 2015, this was pretty much the pinnacle of what could be called a science laboratory in Equestria. But what was it doing in a sleepy hamlet like Ponyville? There were too many questions running through her mind, and her head was starting to develop a dull throb to match the one in her stomach. She levitated her glasses off long enough to rub the bridge of her muzzle.

“Might not want to do the unicorn thing too much,” Hal advised, pointing at a mirror on the wall. Quantum noted the chocolate brown earth stallion with the fine taste in neckwear looking back at her.

“Right, I saw that already. Who am I?”

Hal beeped and booped while Quantum approached the mirror to compare her narrow muzzle and sapphire eyes with the rounded snout and baby blues of her counterpart.

“Hooves,” Hal finally replied.

“Huh?” Quantum lifted a hoof and inspected it. “What about them?”

“No,” Hal corrected. “Hooves. That’s your name. Doctor Hooves.”

Quantum scrunched her muzzle. “I’m a doctor? What am I a doctor of? Hooves? Am I a podiatrist or something?”

Hal was furiously booping, “Gimmie a minute. Tissy feeds information into this thing faster than I can process it back out. You know how she is when it comes to strings of raw data.”

Quantum had the good doctor’s reflection make a face in the mirror and flatten his ears. “…how is she?”

“About what you’d expect,” Hal said without breaking stride in his work. “She misses you.”

“She said that?”

“No,” Hal replied. “But she doesn’t need to. She named Brutus after you.”

“What?”

Hal paused. “…forget it. Let’s just try to figure this all out and get you home so we can go back to better times and helping Tissy find her cutie mark.” He moved right into the task at hand. “You’re a scientist. And that’s your name, Doctor Hooves. I guess vaulting into somepony you can share a vocation with is a relief, huh?”

Quantum stepped away from the mirror and focused on a crack in the wall where sunlight was visible. There were a dozen more such cracks positioned throughout the building, such that she was surprised the equipment within hadn’t been damaged. A more appraising glance at the room in general told her some of the machines had indeed been damaged in the recent past, and were subsequently repaired.

“…so my name is Who?”

“What?”

“No,” Quantum corrected, “Who.”

“What who?”

“This Who,” Quantum indicated herself.

“Oh, Doctor.”

“What?”

“Doctor.”

“Doctor….Who, right?”

“Who?”

“Doctor Who,” Quantum rumbled. “So my name is Who.”

“I know who you are.”

Quantum waved her forelegs in front of Hal’s grinning mug. “Stoppit. I’m a doctor. And my name is Who.”

Hal chuckled. “Hooves. Doctor Hooves. And sort of, but your first name actually is ‘Doctor’.”

Quantum glanced back in the mirror. “…wow. Talk about having your life planned out for you. This guy would make a horrible comedian. Or maybe a hilarious one.”

Hal moved on. “Anyway. Tissy doesn’t have any evidence that Ponyville was in a situation like this twenty-four years ago, but you know that doesn’t rule out the possibility that this could be an anomaly in our own timestream. Everything you do here might still affect future events in our own reality.”

“But why am I here?” Quantum asked the obvious question, levitating a beaker off a lab bench and swirling around an ambiguous magenta liquid within. “And who or what in Equestria was that…thing I met earlier?”

Hal examined his display – he hovered slightly higher, his wings on auto-pilot again. “Tissy says there’s a…wait, what?” He smacked his control device against the flat of his hoof, “C’mon Tissy, get the bolts out this morning. That makes no sense.”

“What makes no sense?” Quantum persisted, huffing out an annoyed breath.

“Doccccc!” An unfamiliar voice caused both ponies to stare at the door, which was being pushed ajar on what it had left for hinges. “Hey Doc? You home?”

Hal phased through a table. Quantum rolled her eyes at him until he fluttered back up into the open with a sheepish look. The minty mare, realizing there was nowhere to go, took a deep breath and steeled herself against whatever bizarre creature was coming to get her this time.

In walked a pony. A very normal looking pegasus mare with a gray coat, a scruffy, ash-yellow mane and tail, and a pattern of bubbles on her rump. She had a covered picnic basket hooked around one hoof and was three-legging it along with a bright smile on her muzzle. The new arrival’s eyes passed right over Hal, but her grin widened when they landed on Quantum.

“Hey Doc!” The mare smiled lopsidedly, bucking the door closed hard enough to weaken its hinges even more. “I made muffins!”

“Uh…hi?” Quantum replied. She glanced at Hal out of the corner of her eye. The burnt-orange pegasus was booping furiously at his controls.

“Gee Doc,” the newcomer went on, sitting the basket on the lab bench while simultaneously knocking a test tube rank onto the floor and spilling its contents. “I was flying over before and I saw you running around town. I tried to say hi but you seemed really busy. Did something happen?”

“Well…” Quantum sputtered, “That is…I—”

“Trottingham accent!” Hal cut in, beeping with abandon, “You have a Trottingham accent!”

“Eh, ah…” the minty mare took a breath, “Roight! Well…yanno gov, I was jus’…runnin’ off me bangers and mash wif’ a good stretch of ye olde fetlocks, savvy?”

“…what, Doc?”

“Less Trottingham accent!” Hal smacked his forehead, “You can’t speak bumpkin, you can’t speak Trottinghammer—haven’t you ever watched a play or someth—you really need an acting coach!” The pegasus tripped over his words and rolled his eyes dramatically, “Just speak normally. It’ll have to do!”

“I was out for a run!” Quantum blurted, never taking her eyes off the newcomer. “It’s a nice day for a run! Running! It’s good for you!”

To the minty mare’s surprise, the gray pegasus only shrugged. “Oh. Okay!” With a smile, she threw back the checkered towel over the picnic basket with her teeth and grinned. “Muffin?”

Quantum raised a curious brow at the mare with the basket of muffins. She attempted to follow the pony’s gaze, but found herself trying to stare in two directions at once. The gray pegasus had a serious lazy eye problem. One of her golden yellow orbs was nearly always staring in a different direction than the other.

“Ditzy Doo,” Hal finally provided. “Also goes by Muffins, but apparently most of her friends call her Derpy Hooves.”

“You don’t say,” Quantum commented drolly as she watched the gray pony just now notice she had spilled the test tubes. Derpy looked around for a mop, shrugged, and was bending down to lick up the random potions until Quantum flicked the nearby mop in her direction with magic. The mop bopped Derpy in the noggin. She looked up, grinned broadly at its sudden presence as if it were a gift from above, and nabbed it in her teeth to go to work.

“Wait, Hooves?” Quantum asked, “Are they related?”

Hal booped and shook his head. “Inconclusive, but apparently she hangs out at the Doctor’s lab so much it might as well be her home. She’s an oddjobber with a couple of regular gigs – works at a moving company sometimes, a printing press, delivers parcels for the postal service, and, well,” Hal waved at the basket, “she bakes muffins. Apparently she’s known for them. Try one.”

“Huh? Why?”

“Because if your stomach doesn’t shut up soon I’m gonna start considering it to be disturbing the peace, and that’s saying something in a town where everything already is disturbed.”

Quantum flashed her companion a smart-aleck look and approached Derpy from behind. The mare was at her toil and was whistling while she worked – Quantum couldn’t help but wonder how this curious pony could be so bright and cheery considering the nightmare landscape just outside the door. Instinctively, she caught a muffin in the glow of her magic and began levitating it towards her mouth.

“No unicorn magic!” Hal reproached.

Quantum dropped the muffin in her mouth the moment Derpy turned around. The minty mare stood there stupidly, lips crammed full of pastry and intending to talk through it to explain herself, but Derpy only grinned.

“Good idea Doc! It’s probably lunchtime!” With that, the gray pegasus nabbed a muffin of her own and busied herself enjoying it. Quantum whewed mentally and followed suit, but a sudden sharp pain in her jaw caused her to meal to escape her and fall to the floor.

“Ow!” she hissed, holding a hoof over her lips, “I feel like I just chipped a tooth! What’s in these things!?”

Derpy looked up innocently. “Rocks. Why?”

“R-rocks!?” Quantum looked back at Hal, who shrugged obliviously, “Rocks? But….rocks? Seriously, you put rocks in a batch of muffins?”

Derpy took no offense. “Aw, c’mon Doc. We talked about rockmuffins like two weeks ago.”

“And what exactly did we say about ‘rock muffins’ two weeks ago!?” Quantum huffed. Derpy’s smile finally vanished.

“There are no more berries. And no more fruit. And no more sweets. And almost no more grain. Plain muffins aren’t any fun.”

Quantum could feel the striking iron of her anger temper and cool. Her heart filled with pity, and she reached out, laying a hoof atop one of Derpy’s.

“Right,” the minty mare admitted, “Right, of course. I forgot all about that. Of course that’s the reason. Thank you for lunch.” When Derpy’s smile returned, Quantum moved to raise her hoof.

It didn’t move.

“Huh?”

Quantum yanked. Once. Twice. On the third yank she pressed her hind leg to the lab bench for support and pulled so hard, inertia ended up causing her to topple onto her back. When she recovered, she could only glance at her own hoof, and then at Derpy’s.

“What…what just--?”

“Gee,” Derpy observed. “It’s a little stronger than yesterday, huh.”

The gray pegasus turned obliviously back to her toil, humming a pleasant tune. Quantum looked to Hal, who was back to loudly beeping and booping colorful buttons on his device.

“Hal,” Quantum whispered, “what was Tissy trying to say before? For Celestia’s sake, I don’t care how weird it sounds, tell me what’s going on here!”

Hal responded by smacking a button that opened up a floating, gleaming white portal back to 2039. “I have to be sure what I’m reading. Sit tight. Have another muffin, eat around the rocks, and try to get some rest. Just whatever you do, don’t touch that mare over there.”

“Why—”

“Just don’t touch her.”

Hal barked out the order with such force that the minty mare turned sciencepony stallion was left with nothing to say.

Comments

[Frission]

Mysterious bizzareness!

[Everglue Horace]

I mean no disrespect, but I believe the horse of death is a 'brag' called Binky... Most reports of Death's horse (when it shows up in fiction) are that it is either missing it's head or missing it's leg.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brag_(folklore)

[DerpTape]

Who's a Doctor skit for the win!

[Blackdust]

Quantum didn’t have anything on her stomach. But that didn’t stop her from dry-heaving into the bushes.

Pretty sure you meant anything in her stomach, right?

[WishyWish]

8443440
Nope, meant 'on'. As in - "I shouldn't take that medication on an empty stomach." One can say that they have food 'in' their stomach, or 'on' it.

Glad somepony's reading this!