Definately Not your Average Day
"AH!" Sunset awoke with a start, her breathing tense and quick. She was lying on a bed, covered with a thin sheet and a layer of sweat.
"Ow!" she exclaimed again. Pain built up in the back of her head and she started to rub it. That's when she noticed something.
"Where's my hand?" Quickly she pulled her arm up to her face and looked it over. She had trouble getting her eyes to focus, but she still realized what she was looking at.
"AHHH!!!" She screamed in terror once more as she noticed that her hand was missing, and that her arm resembled a foam noodle. Only it wasn't foam; it was bone and flesh and, most notably, fur.
She looked at her other arm and noticed in horror that it had suffered the same fate as her first. At the end of her wrist was what seemed to be...a hoof. Her breathing quickened even more and she could hear rapid beeping that seemed to match her heartbeat. She felt yet another problem: her feet, or rather the lack of them. She noticed that even under the cover of the sheet her legs looked remarkably similar to her new arms.
"Then it is as I feared."
Sunset looked over toward the source of the voice. Her vision was still slightly blurred, but she thought she saw the flowing green and purple hair of Principal Celestia. At the sight of her, the muscles in Sunset’s shoulders relaxed and a smile even began forming between her cheeks. Maybe it was just her faulty vision that made her believe her hands and feet were gone. She lifted her arms in front of her face again. Slowly, what lay before her came into focus. But she still had hooves. She looked back to Principal Celestia.
Her eyes grew wide and her heart started racing again. It wasn’t Principal Celestia. It was a horse. A white horse with large wings folded at its sides, and a long horn on its forehead. It looked at her with, from what she could tell, worry. Then, it spoke again. "You're not the Sunset Shimmer I know, are you?"
"Who - what are you?! Why do you look like my principal?! For that matter what am I?! Where am I?!" Sunset started hammering out all the questions on her mind, the beeping (which she now knew was coming from a heart monitor nearby) increasing with each question.. "Wait, you mean you know that girl who looked like me?! Hold on, hold on, you said her name was Sunset Shimmer, but- but that's my name! What is going on here!?!"
The horse looked down, remorsefully. "There is no easy way for me to explain this. This is definitely going to be a painful thing for you to hear, but I'll start from the beginning. To answer your more basic questions, you are in Equestria, specifically you are in the hospital wing of my castle in Canterlot, the capital of the land. I am Celestia, the ruling princess. I am an Alicorn, which are in technicality a mixture of the strengths of each of the three races of ponies: Earth, Pegasi, and Unicorns. You yourself are now in the body of a Unicorn.
"This is where things become a little more complicated. You see, here we have an artifact - a magic mirror that acts as a portal to your dimension. When one steps through it, the portal transforms them. Unfortunately, our two dimensions are parallel, which means that-"
"The girl, she's my parallel!" Sunset burst out in sudden realization.
"Precisely. So to answer why I look like your “principal”, she must be my parallel. Now for the hard part. Regarding the other Sunset Shimmer, I know her because she was one of my students." The horse - Celestia seemed to flinch at that, and Sunset found herself suddenly wondering why. "Obviously there are a lot of parallels within our dimensions including names, so I believe that - especially given her timing - she's decided to switch lives with you. To what end she hopes to take this I am unsure, but what I do know is that when she switched, the portal was near closing. By now, it has closed, and will remain closed for another thirty moons."
"Thirty moons," Sunset questioned. "Well, how long would that be?"
Celestia sighed. "Moons are a fickle measurement of time. Sometimes it means years-"
Celestia jumped as Sunset cried out, "Years! I’m going to be trapped here for thirty YEARS!” She tried to chew her nails, but only reminded herself that she didn’t even have nails. She shouted again, “I’ll be older than my mother by the time I get back!” In her anxiety, she settled for chewing the edge of one of her hooves.
The white princess sighed once more. "The portal will actually be opening in thirty months. As I said moons are a fickle time measurement, they can mean years, months, weeks, even days. According to my measurements, this cycle will last for thirty months."
Thirty months definitely wasn't thirty years, but it was still a long time. She'd be a Junior in high school by then - and even in the second semester. Sunset also sighed, her new, long ears flattening instinctively as her emotions went from shock and fear to despair. "It's still two and a half years. I may as well be stuck here for life."
Celestia's own ears flattened as she looked at her with her own sadness. She wasn't used to delivering news of this kind. "That was the last thing I was planning to tell you. While I am unsure of the exact circumstances of your arrival, it seems that my Sunset Shimmer was ‘lucky’ enough to have found you and sent you here without any complications. If there were any, I would've had to deal with a bit more than just you coming through the portal - that much is obvious. In any case, this...this is the worst news I have for you. You won't be able to return to your world." Sunset opened her mouth cry out again, but Celestia continued quickly. "Allow me to explain. By the time the portal opens, my Sunset Shimmer will have altered your life too greatly. Even more so, you two fighting over your life could doom both our dimensions. As much as it pains me to say it, you are stuck here. The only thing I can do is help you to adjust to this life and help you pick up where your other left off."
Sunset couldn't speak, couldn't even think of what to do. Her life had been shattered, taken over by someone who wasn't even actually human. Taken over by a horse. The only thing she could do at the moment was stare hopelessly down at her new body, one she was now going to have to live with for the rest of her life. Tears started to flow down her cheeks as she silently sobbed.
Celestia approached and wrapped one of her wings around the new Sunset Shimmer, in an attempt to offer any consolation she could. She'd already explained the whole scenario to Sunset's parents who were at this very moment trying to pull themselves together, understanding the similarities between their situation and that of this “new” Sunset Shimmer.
Celestia had to tell them; she couldn't leave them in the dark. They would have noticed anyway, as they knew how Sunset Shimmer was before she went through the portal. They would recognize a difference. So Celestia continued attempting to comfort the trembling Unicorn, while praying that Sunset and her "new parents'" first meeting would go well.
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Three years really would be a long time to try and fit back into your life...
Celestia, you are truly cruel here. All that this Sunset has to do it clobber the unicorn sunset and throw her into the mirror.
Maybe Sunset Bright for her mother? Because Twilight's mom is named Twilight too.
5579723 but doable. seriously i bet this Sunset will try to get her life back.
This is a great original idea, just needs some grammar fixes.
That makes no sense. There's no reason not to go back; taking her life back couldn't be any harder than adapting to Equestria, and surely she'd want to reconnect with her family. This puts a pretty hard stop on suspension of disbelief.
okay, this transition chapter takes place far too quick. It would take DAYS of slow revelations just to get all this out, Sunset Shimmer would be going into hysterics at each new revelation. Shock, denial, bargaining, anger, depression, acceptance--- the protagonist has to go through all of these in some form or other, and in this case, shock and denial would last days due to the surreality of the situation, starting with waking up in a new body.
Plus, you need to come up with a better explanation than "she'll have messed up your life, so you can't go back." People recuperate from far worse derailings than that all the time, up to and including being declared dead for years. And the "imperils our dimensions" thing is too vague and overused. (universes are rather larger and more stable than to be disrupted by a mere ant-speck of matter swapping between them-- and anything smaller than a galaxy is an ant speck.)
A clearer, more workable (and coincidentally canonical) explanation is that the two dimensions aren't quite temporally synced; decades would pass on the other side before it opened again. ....and that this was the low ebb of the cycle: the time drift was only going to get bigger (which would explain how a thousand-year-old Alicorn princess could have a mortal, thirty-year-old high-school principal as a counterpart.) Celestia also being worried about conquerors from the human world (and there'd be a few) discovering the portal would be a legitimate issue...
6889773 Your truth and name are creepily parellel.
Very interesting, nice work.
You want to know whats really bad? When you start reading a story and the first prominent thought that strikes you about it is, "Oh thank god, someone who knows how to properly use quotation marks in dialog spanning multiple paragraphs!"
So yeah, thank you for making my nite by knowing that simple grammar rule that so many on this site don't seem to.
6889773
There are different kind of people. What you wrote is quite an extreme.
Like man others, I agree the whole not able to return to her own world is total BS. I can think of more then a few ways to make it happen.
1: Upon the portal opening, Celestia and Human Turned Pony Sunset, go through Sunset takes Princess Celestia to Principal Celestia to arrange a meeting with Human Turned Pony Sunset's parents to sort things out. Will things probably be bumpy? Hell yes, but its a start. And if by that time Pony Turned Human Sunset is not reformed they can still do something about her.
2: Upon the Portal opening Celestia could send Twilight and Sunset human turned pony (hence forth HTPS) through to confront Pony Turned Human Sunset (PTHS).
8015750 Same.
It is a missed opportunity.
You could use Sunset trying to get back as both motivation for her character as well as a plot point when she figures out later how difficult such a return would be.
You could even have Celestia keep the ramifications of her returning back to her world a secret...setting it up for this Sunset turning evil just as her counter part did. Possibly even having the reformed Sunset help calm and sub due her now evil counter part.
So many things that could have been done, or at the very least expounded upon.
As I said it is a missed opportunity.