Quantum Vault

by WishyWish

7.2 - Pooky's Egg Navy

May 15, 2030

Stability

Wednesday Evening

It occurred to Quantum as she wandered through orderly streets that she had no idea where she was going. Stumbling about in a daze, she had no books, no effects, and was still dressed in the rumpled jersey that had been clinging to her since she arrived. She hadn’t even thought to look for Hal’s locker.

Somewhere in her wanderings, Quantum had noticed a signpost that read ‘Borough of Stability’. According to the sign, the small hamlet boasted a modest population figure and was approximately twenty miles outside of Fillydelphia. Glancing about, she quickly came to the conclusion that a suburb had never been more aptly named. The afternoon sun of mid-spring glinted over the whitewashed picket fences and finely groomed lawns of cookie-cutter cul-de-sacs, while a pleasant breeze caught and rustled sycamore leaves to a cozy tempo. It was all so perfectly quaint that Quantum felt a small pang of jealousy. In the nurse’s office, she’d guessed correctly about her identity and age, and thus she had to assume this was the environment in which her classmate had spent his most impressionable years. Her own youth in Baltimare felt like a noir crime novel by comparison.

Clarity returned, and questions began to leak into her consciousness. She didn’t have long to wait for answers.

With a whoosh of blinding light that forced only Quantum to shield her eyes, Hal appeared, floating as usual several hooves from the ground on wings that pumped as involuntarily as a beating heart. She noticed the frosted tips in his mane more than ever before, and his fuchsia turtleneck was nearly as blinding as the portal from their own time. Hal was already booping buttons and moving his lips.

“...believe that? I mean at the very least, this time around I can--” he looked up, “...you didn’t hear anything I just said, did you.”

Quantum pensively shook her head.

“I was saying,” Hal spoke with his hoof upturned as though he had a point to make, “That this time around at the very least I can help you get around. Tissy says we’re in Stability. It’s a little suburb not far from Fillydelphia, and guess what?”

Quantum waited.

“This is the town I grew up in!” Hal continued brightly. “We don’t have a fix on the exact year yet, but judging by the look of the place, it can’t be too far in the--”

“May fifteenth,” Quantum interrupted. “Two thousand thirty.”

“--past or future,” Hal considered the new information without having to enter anything onto his keypad. “Huh, whattaya know. I’d have been about...”

“Sixteen,” Quantum cut in again.

“...aaand I was a--”

“Sophomore at Twin Pines Municipal High School,” Quantum completed the thought. “Imagine that.”

Hal scrunched his muzzle and examined Quantum as though seeing her for the first time. “You’re wearing a phys-ed jersey. If you’re a student, you should probably be in class right now.”

“Nope.” Quantum said smartly. “How many times did you get hit in the face with dodgeballs in high school?”

The strange question threw Hal off. He stared at the sky and shrugged. “I dunno. It...happened once or twice. Dodgeball is a rough game.” He flexed his bicep. “You learn to roll with the punches.”

Quantum digested the offerings of the coral-pink mare who had led her to the infirmary. “We have other ways of getting exercise for our bodies than playing dodgeball or hoofball with a bunch of punks that just want an excuse to hurt somepony, Twinklehooves.” She quoted.

Hal blanched. “...where did you hear that?”

Quantum stepped over to a storm drain, where a puddle from a previous rain still lingered. She pointed down at it until Hal was obliged to peer into the reflection the still, clear waters projected. She then mentally counted down the three seconds it took for Hal to go white.

“Wh...wh...what in...what!?”

Every volley of words the burnt-orange pegasus tried to fire off skidded sideways against the armor of absurdity all around him. He assaulted his device with pokes and prods until it emitted chirps of complaint. He didn’t even notice when his wings gave up on him, and his holographic rump failed to disturb the well-manicured grass of the front lawn.

“How...how is this even possible!?” He babbled. “The very fact that you’re here in my body means that something is going to go wrong here that you have to fix, but I have no memory of anything like that happening, but then if I did know something I’m not supposed to know, I might cease to exist, but clearly I haven’t ceased to exist, so everything I know must be right, but I don’t know anything about this to begin with, so I--”

“Poindexter!” Quantum cupped a hoof over her muzzle and shouted. “Stop your brain at the next station! You’re running in circles!”

Hal held his forelegs out in front of him and took a deep breath. Blinking several times, he pushed himself up to his hooves, dusted himself off unnecessarily, and touched his hooves to his temples. “Okay...okay. Back in my happy place.”

Quantum leaned against a tree, still feeling the kick of the ball and the fumes of the flecks of vomit that were now embedded in her collar. She angled her chin at the control device. “What’s Tissy got to say about all this?”

Hal examined his readouts as though it hadn’t yet occurred to him to do so. “Tissy says...you’re me.”

“Keen grasp of the obvious,” Quantum offered drolly.

“And--” Hal continued, “the resonance frequencies of local spacetime in this area suggest that this place is very close to being our actual reality.”

The two ponies stared at one another, each waiting for the other to speak. Quantum broke the silence.

“I met you when we both started at C.A.S. Right now I’d still be living in Baltimare with my mother. So...I guess whatever is going on here has nothing to do with me.”

Hal nodded his agreement. His device beeped, and he glanced down at it. “Tissy says you stink.”

“Tell her so does she!” Quantum stuck out her tongue. Hal rolled his eyes and gestured at his classmate’s ragged outfit.

“You’re going to draw attention to yourself wandering around in a gym uniform during school hours, off of campus, talking to yourself with barf all over you.”

Quantum shrugged dramatically. “What am I supposed to do about it?”

Hal’s eyes shifted both ways down the street. He sighed, chose a direction, and fluttered back into the air. “I’ll show you where I live.”

Ten minutes later, Quantum found herself standing before a gleaming white front door under the well-constructed porch of a split level, complete with a carriage garage and an electric doorbell. Hal gestured encouragingly towards the entrance as he tried to ignore the uncertain look on his own face in the reflection of the windows.

“Just go in and yell ‘I’m home’. I live here, remember? I’ll tell you everything you need to say and do. This’ll be a cinch for once.”

“What’s my excuse for being home early?” Quantum challenged.”

Hal grappled with the question. He looked as though his carefully constructed house of cards had just been blown down.

“Just go straight to my room.”

Quantum took a breath, resigned herself to the most bizarre set of circumstances she’d been through yet, pushed the door open, and made her announcement.

The tiny foyer immediately split into sharp inclines of staircases leading both up and down. Before Quantum could so much as choose which direction to go, a feminine voice called out from upstairs.

“Oh Pooky, did you have trouble in gym class again? Go get yourself cleaned up and Mommy will make you your favorite egg-in-boats!”

“Pooky?” Quantum managed to gag through the convulsions of her stomach as it rolled with the throes of stifled laughter.

“Shut it,” Hal growled. “Upstairs, end of the hall on the left. Do NOT pause when you walk past the kitchen. Mom will talk your ear off clear until dinnertime.”

Quantum obeyed, primarily because she was having a hard time keeping the volcanic torrent of laughter from obliterating the Pompeii of her higher reasoning. Slipping up the stairs and down the hall, she caught the doorknob to Hal’s room in her magic and burst in, shutting the door behind her just in time to collapse into a fit of giggles against it.

“...okay, okay, so--” Quantum fought to catch her breath, “You’ve gotta tell me what ‘egg-in-boats’ is!”

Hal was still phasing through a wall. He had his forelegs crossed and was looking away, the orange cinders of his fluffy cheeks darkening with color. “It’s...come on, you know what it is. It’s a common dish.”

“Common for you maybe,” Quantum put a hoof on her chest to still her breathing. “When I was really little, before we settled down in Baltimare, I used to think Princess Celestia had a rule that one meal every day had to be fast food hayburgers.”

The levity helped to scatter the cloud forming over Hal’s mood. “It’s just a soft-boiled egg with pieces of toast floating in it.” He made a gesture as though his foreleg was floating on a rough sea. “Boats.”

“That sounds like something you’d feed a foal to get them to shut up and eat.”

Hal opened his mouth and shut it again, wide-eyed at the revelation. “I just liked it, that’s all! My mom would never...do that...”

“Uh huh.” Quantum flipped the soiled jersey over her head and tossed it onto the floor, just happy to have it off of her. “So how come you don’t live in Cloudsdale or something?”

“There’s no rule that say all pegasi have to live in Cloudsdale,” Hal replied. “My father is an earth pony, and my mother is...something of a traditionalist. So she followed him into his life rather than the other way around.”

Quantum nodded along, some of the information not knew to her. “Don’t you have a sister?”

“Two sisters,” Hal held up one hoof for each of his siblings. “One older and one younger. I’m the middle child.”

“Ouch,” Quantum observed.

“You have no idea,” Hal laughed, finally flitting into the room proper. Hovering over his own unmade bed, he held his forelegs akimbo and spun around slowly in mid-air. “Well, you might as well take it all in. Those words you said earlier - you could only have heard them from one pony, and you’re about to understand why she said all that.”

Quantum took in the room. It had the expected musty, juvenile masculine scent to it. Unlike Hal who usually kept himself in good order, the room was surprisingly haphazard. There were pieces of science projects and equipment littering the desk and the floor in equal measure, mixing with books and laundry that hadn’t found its way to the hamper yet. She soft, smoky gray of the walls was broken up by a number of posters depicting famous Maretonian ballet dancers, both male and female. These, more than anything, caught and kept Quantum’s attention.

“You do ballet?” She asked incredulously.

“Yeah,” Hal was scratching at the back of his neck, still floating in mid-air. “What?”

“W-well,” Quantum balked, “I just meant...” searching for a way out of the corner she had spoken herself into, she turned her attention to the mirror hanging on the back of Hal’s door - simply looking into it as a subtle way to point out Hal’s portly frame.

“Hey.” Hal said simply. “Everypony used to tell me my cutie mark was gonna be a quartet of dancing shoes or a top hat, or something.”

Quantum tilted her head at the revelation. “Really? That’s more than just a passing interest, isn’t it?”

Hal, his toasty-orange cheeks flushed again, gave in to the inevitable and floated down to ‘sit’ on the foot of his own bed without disturbing the covers. “...yeah. It was. And it was more than just ballet. Jazz, tap, ballroom...all that. When the time came to choose between dancing and science, well...” he smiled wanly, “You know which one I picked.” He glanced down at the atom symbol on his flank, emblazoned over a field of argyle that looked as though it were sewn directly into his coat. “My cutie mark apparently agreed.”

Quantum folded her forelegs and stood there, her eyes back on the posters. “So who was she?”

“Who was who?”

“You know who I’m talking about,” Quantum huffed, the wheels of logic turning furiously in her brain. “It all makes sense now. That filly who helped me out today is a dancer. That’s what she was talking about when she was complaining about having to go to gym class at all. And she clearly knows you. So when you chose science--” Realizing that she was probably about to strike a chord, Quantum lowered her voice, respectfully attempting to take a little of the eureka out of the revelation. “You didn’t choose her.”

Hal only nodded, examining a pile of dirty laundry. “...yep.”

“What’s her name?”

Hal hesitated.

“Hal--” Quantum turned sharply. Her companion winced, expecting to be either made fun of or chastised, but Quantum kept a softness in her voice. “I need to know these things if I’m gonna do...whatever it is I’m gonna do here.”

Hal nodded more times than was necessary. “Right, right, of course...” After another pause, he finally offered: “Twitter Step. Call her Twit.”

Quantum made a face. “I’d smack somepony who called me that.”

“It’s a pet name!” Hal welcomed a small burst of laughter at his friend’s expense. “I mean come on, you know how it is when you’re young, and you meet a filly, and she’s cute, and--”

“Not really, no.” Quantum cut him off, pushing her interphased glasses up on her muzzle with a quick snap of her magic. Hal looked smug.

“Oh yes you do. You can claim anything you want about which way your tail swings, but you’ve been a stallion before. Don’t tell me you weren’t into Cozy Hearth. You spent a whole night in the sheets with her three years and four vaults ago!”

Frazzled, Quantum waved her forelegs so dramatically she nearly took out a microscope that was poised at the precipice of Hal’s desk. “It wasn’t like that! I was just playing the part! You said yourself it might be dangerous to sway too far out of character, and Draw Out was a total mareinizer!”

“Mmhm. That’s today’s excuse.”

“Where you watching!?” Quantum stuck her hoof right through her best friend’s holographic face. “That’s technological brutality!”

Hal was the one who could barely contain himself now. “R-relax...” he sputtered through chuckles, “...relax! I didn’t peek! You told me not much happened anyway, remember?”

Quantum skulked away. “...because there are certain parts of the pony anatomy I can’t just fake, get me?”

“You’d better change your mind about that,” Hal replied. Quantum turned, about to lay into her classmate for his boldness, until she noticed he was pointing at a mirror. She glanced into it. Saw herself...himself. Wings folded tightly at her sides.

“My older sister and I used to be competitive with one another,” Hal explained. “We did three laps between the nearest cloud and the yard every night before dinner. It’s gonna look weird if I suddenly refuse.”

Quantum felt her stomach doing Pilates in her chest. She tried flexing her shoulder blades, but her new wings didn’t so much as twitch. “...no way. I’m not a pegasus. I don’t even have wing spurs! I don’t fly!”

Hal waved the panic off and took out his device. “We can deal with that later. Right now we have to figure out what’s going on here.” He typed. Studied his readouts. His ears fell.

Quantum’s instinct was to demand information, but the sullen look on her friend’s face quieted her. This was his life she was messing with. She sat on the bed and waited patiently for Hal to control the explanation.

Hal clutched the device to his chest. “...well, it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? Tissy says that...” his eyes shifted around the room. “There’s a dance next week. At school. Go with Twit.”

Quantum looked skeptical. “That’s it? Just go with her to a dance?”

“That’s most certainly not ‘it!’” Hal scolded. “Can you dance?”

Quantum didn’t reply.

“That’s what I thought. I’ve been dancing since before I was out of diapers. This isn’t something you can just learn overnight like how to swing your hips the right way when you walk. And on top of that, three-fifths of my family can fly! We’re gonna have to figure something out before they start wondering what the heck is wrong with you--with me.”

“Wait,” Quantum thought aloud. “You didn’t go to this dance with Twitter before, did you?”

“No,” Hal admitted.

“...then wouldn’t I be changing history if I go with her now?”

Hal was silent for a moment, watching the late afternoon sun kiss the treetops outside. “You’re supposed to fix the past. Not just keep the status quo.”

Quantum’s train of thought thundered on. “You don’t know that. We’ve just been making educated guesses with the available data all this time, haven’t we? Besides, how do you know that going to that dance will fix anything? Is there anything wrong with your past the way you know it?”

“It would,” Hal offered soberly, “Because it was the biggest mistake of my life. I dunno if I would have ended up with her if we’d gone to that dance. We’d always been friends. I wanted more...I don’t even know if she did. But dammit--” He suddenly turned and fixed her with a glare, “I should have gone. This isn’t about ‘getting the filly’, Cutie. It’s about following through. About doing something you say you’re going to do and sticking with it. You know why I didn’t go? Because to me, it was the next step in our relationship. And...I got cold hooves.” Hal paused to swallow before continuing. “I made a dumb excuse and stayed home. We were still friends until graduation...but that was it. It never went beyond that. I lost touch with her, went on to C.A.S., and to this day I don’t know if I have the guts to come through when the going gets rough. So if I had to venture a guess?” He paused to collect himself, “That’s what you’re ‘fixing’. My faith in myself.”

Quantum didn’t know what to say. She had never thought of her pudgy friend as somepony who had misgivings about his own abilities. She offered the only comment she could.

“You’ve never failed me.”

Awkwardness permeated the room, until Quantum finally added: “Thanks for confiding all this in me.”

“I don’t really have a choice, do I,” Hal replied.

“Pooky!” A voice that was distinctively Hal’s mother rang out from the hall. “Ship’s pulling out of port!”

Quantum snickered. Hal did too.

“Go eat,” Hal encouraged. “I’ll help you through whatever comes.”

Quantum smiled, renewed with vigor for her new mission in time. She tilted her head, smiled conspiratorially, and moved to the door. “Hooves in the game.”

Hal’s smile vanished the moment Quantum turned away.

Comments

[RTStephens]

Heh, cute.

Suppose this answers some of my questions but only raises new ones. This jump will really test the running theory if any of what Quantum is doing is changing her own world.

Once she learns how to get her wings to open, that is...

[Everglue Horace]

Hal’s smile vanished the moment Quantum turned away.

Because QT was about to face off against Twilight Sparkle's old enemies and the diabolical forces of the adjustment burro...

[ferret]

Hal’s smile vanished the moment Quantum turned away.

He did go to the dance with Twit and it was a disaster, and he's trying to fool Quantum into not trying to fix things!

...I'm very good at reading faces.