Replica
“Now, I know it seems simple," Twilight Sparkle said with a smile, her posture straightening slightly, wings ruffling behind her. “But this is actually one of the more important spells to learn, Sweetie Belle. Teleporting objects, even the most infinitesimal of distances, is one of the first steps in being able to teleport yourself.”
Sweetie Belle looked to the left of Twilight, where a tangerine sat on a stool. Her eyes traveled over Twilight to the right, where another stool, bare of anything, stood. “I don’t think this is that simple, Twilight. Teleportation is crazy! I still don’t even know how you do it!”
Twilight chuckled, setting her hoof on the stool next to tangerine. “Well, I learned the teleportation spell when I was a little bit older than you, but I had the hang of teleporting objects for some time before that. You’ve got potential, Sweetie Belle, and if we exercise it now, you’ll be able to accomplish amazing things!”
Sweetie Belle looked at the tangerine, arching her eyebrow suspiciously at it.
Twilight looked at the little orange fruit, and then back to Sweetie Belle. “Teleportation is really simple when you think about it, Sweetie. If you just imagine space as one plane, with time as a line bisecting it perpendicularly, and then you have the space plane constantly moving UP the time line,” Twilight made a motion with her hoof to represent the elevation of the plane. “To represent the motion of time, of course, then you just imagine teleportation as moving an object vertically, across the space plane,” Twilight dragged her hoof sideways in a straight line to simulate the effect. “Without having it go up along the time plane, so it’s instantaneous! That’s a very simplistic rendition of it, seeing as I’ve edited out a lot of imaginary geometry, how leylines factor in, and I haven’t even accounted for other dimensions and timelines, but I think it gets the point across rather clearly, wouldn’t you say?”
Sweetie Belle stared up at Twilight blankly, her mouth slightly agape, her eyes glazed and unfocused.
Twilight’s brow creased. “R-Right. Anyway, let’s just get back to the work at hoof, shall we? Set your focus on the target object…”
Sweetie Belle blinked hard, and swiveled her head to face the fruit, furrowing her brow and sticking her tongue out slightly.
“Now, concentrate on the object, as if you were doing a levitation spell…”
Sweetie’s small horn sparked, a pale green glow surrounding the orange.
“Now, instead of trying to exert your own strength through magic to lift it like you do in levitation…” Twilight said, eyes flicking back and forth between Sweetie and the tangerine. “Try and imagine—conceptualize!—the target object in the place you want it to be. Don’t think about it moving, that’s not the goal! You really want it to be IN the place you want it to be. Thinking about moving it will only slow it down, it needs to be put there in an instant!”
Sweetie’s brow furrowed, her eyes narrowing as the aura around the tangerine richened in hue. A single bead of sweat formed on her forehead, and she crouched down, teeth grit and face gnarled in a grimace as she focused all of her energy on the tangerine.
Twilight grinned, her eyes sparkling as she felt the hairs of her coat along the right side of her body raise, their close proximity to the tangerine and the energy setting them straight up. “Yes! You’re doing it, Sweetie! And on your first try, too! It took me three times before I could do it! Keep going! You’re almost there!”
Sweetie Belle let out a high pitched whine as she clamped her eyes shut, her grimace almost comically dragging her mouth down past her chin. The thin outline of a vein on her forehead, just below her horn, was barely visible. It throbbed in time with the strobing of the light on her horn, which shot out a spark now and then.
“Alright, Sweetie…” Twilight said, eying the fluctuation of energy around Sweetie’s horn. “If you feel like you’re exerting yourself too much, don’t be afraid to pull back, I don’t want you to get hurt.”
Sweetie craned her neck down, her eyes opening for just a moment. As her eyelids fluttered, her eyes rolled back for just a moment. Her muzzle scrunched, twitched, and—
“AH-CHOO!” Sweetie shot up in the air, hopping backwards a few inches as her horn let out a burst of supercharged energy.
Twilight cringed, quickly encapsulating herself in a bubble of force. The tangerine disappeared in a flash of green energy… as did the stool… and a large chunk of the floor… but Twilight remained unscathed as the energy shield dissipated around her.
Sweetie Belle slumped to the floor, her horn sparking at random intervals, her back hoof twitching slightly. Looking up, her face damp with sweat, she gazed at the hole in the center of the room.
“Oops.”
Twilight gazed down into the hole, which lead down through the crystal floor, and then through almost a foot of dirt. Roots cut down the middle were visible in the perfect cross-section of the ground—even an unlucky worm had been caught in the crossfire and had been cut in two. Halfway down, the burrow of a small animal was exposed, and a confused mole poked its head out to confirm this.
Twilight’s focus was on, however, the section of the earth even further down. The dirt gave way to stone at a foot down, and the chunk began to close out in this rocky section. However, a hole about three feet across at the bottom of the removed chunk formed an aperture into a cavern. The light from the room shown through, illuminating a dim patch at the bottom of the cave, exposing a smooth surface.
“I-I’m sorry Twilight!” Sweetie Belle squeaked, hoping to her hooves and promptly falling over, her horn crackling with green sparks.
Twilight stepped back from the hole, her face fixed in a quizzical expression. “No, no, Sweetie, it’s alright… I’m just glad you’re okay! I just… I just never knew they were these caves under my castle.”
“Wh-What? There’s a cave?” Sweetie Belle tried to get to her hooves, but dizziness overcame the poor filly and she sunk to her side again.
Twilight nodded. “Yes, you exposed a previously undiscovered cavern structure! At least, I believe it’s previously undiscovered… I’ll have to check some geological surveys to confirm that…”
“But look at everything I’ve done!” Sweetie Belle said, weakly gesturing at the gaping hole in the floor.
Twilight chuckled softly. “Oh, Sweetie, you don’t have to worry about this. I kind of wanted to wait a bit longer to show you this spell, but since you’ve given me such a perfect opportunity to use it…”
“Huh?” Sweetie Belle looked up at Twilight, confusion splashed on her face just as heavily as the sweat from her magical ordeals.
“Look closely at where you teleported all of the matter away,” Twilight said. “In the space you left behind.”
Sweetie squinted at the gap in the floor. “It looks all fuzzy… like the air above a fire, where there isn’t any smoke!”
Twilight nodded. “Yes! Very good! That’s the disturbance of magical energy left behind by teleportation events. It happens briefly when I teleport as well, but since you teleported a significant amount of matter, the effect stays a bit longer.”
“S-So what does that mean?”
“It means,” Twilight said, her horn glowing slightly as she approached the edge of the gap once more. “That I can cast a spell that will allow me to retrieve the teleported material!”
“Is that safe?”
Twilight frowned slightly. “Well… I’ve never tried to retrieve so much before, that’s for certain… but I’m sure everything will be fine. It’s not exactly a dangerous activity. And if worse comes to worse, it’s not a fantastic amount of damage, and I’m sure repairs can be made easily enough.”
Twilight’s glow around her horn intensified. “I’d take a step back, though, Sweetie. I’ll try to control where the matter comes back as best I can, but this won’t exactly be easy.”
Sweetie Belle pushed herself to her hooves, taking a few shaky steps back until she was pressed up against the wall. “I’m really sorry about this, Twilight…”
“Relax, Sweetie,” Twilight said with a reassuring smile, “Everypony makes mistakes! It’s the only real way to learn. We’ll get you right back on track after this and then you’ll know what not to do, right?”
Sweetie let her lips upturn into a sheepish smile. “Y-Yeah… I guess you’re right.”
Twilight turned from Sweetie Belle to gaze over the hole once more, and shut her eyes. Her brow furrowed in concentration, and the vague distortion in the air around the pit began to glow lavender.
A moment of silence passed before Twilight’s expression changed to one of a confusion. “Hold on, something’s not right…”
“I-It’s not?” Sweetie’s eyes went wide.
“It’s strange,” Twilight said, her eyes still closed, but her forehead and brow were tightly knit in bafflement. “I feel almost as if there are little hooks around my stomach, yanking me forward, like the sensation directly before—“
There was a flash of purple light, and Twilight was gone.
She was faced with a thousand blinding streaks of light; she supposed they could be pinpoints, like stars, but she was going so fast they were like lines, parallel to her, all collapsing at the point of infinity. She soared towards it, and crashed through an impossible heat, reversing and sailing along the lines upside down.
She could feel every single line, every bit of energy, coursing through her veins, her nerves. They pulsated in her, setting her nerves on fire and boiling her blood away until it was only supercharged plasma. Everything lead to her horn, which sparked and shot a column of jagged, pure power from the top, joining the endless cycle to infinity and back, flipping upside down and returning to her.
Her fur was frying, but she loved it. Her wings were shaking, but she embraced it. Her horn…
She can to an abrupt, sudden halt. There was no energy here. Only the smell of burning feathers and smoldering fur. Her horn, her entire body ached now that she was no longer connected to the heart of the leyline. Her hooves shuffled against cold dirt, and she collapsed.
Everything was dark… everything was cold…
A faint, faint heat pulsed out to her from the darkness, and she crawled to it like it was the only thing left of the world. Her hoof scraped against cold dirt, slashing through lifeless, subterranean air—
And it pressed against stone. It cut into the underside of her hoof, slicing through the frog, but she endured the pain. This stone was the most welcome thing she ever touched, and she would not mind if it was the last and only thing she ever touched from here on out.
It radiated slow, painstaking heat… rationing it out to her as the only survivor of a frigid star, buried deep under the rock and soil of a dead planet.
And it spoke to her.
Rehp… le… ka…
“Replica,” she whispered back, flawlessly. Her hooves glided alone the jagged surface, blood dripping from inside her tender hoof, feeling the sharp splinters and serrated edges slowly melt away. It became smooth as ice, but kept the warmth that she craved, slowly pulsing out from inside it, in rhythm with her fragile, dry heart.
A light lit from a horn, but it was not hers. No energy ran from it any longer. It was the horn of a mare in front of her.
It was her, black and shiny, a perfect doppleganger made out of obsidian. She watched as the blood she had trailed along her volcanic glass chest beaded off of it, dripping down her mimic’s leg.
The Obsidian Twilight opened her mouth, and the earth’s grating sound filled her ears.
“—teleportation.” Twilight finished, and promptly slumped over. A huge cylinder of rock, the very tip of the bottom sporting two stalactites, smashed into the crystal floor two feet away from Sweetie Belle, who let out a shrill yelp. The stool fell to the floor, splintering against the cold crystal, and the tangerine rolled away, sliding down into the pit.
“Wow, Twilight! That was amazing! You got it pretty much instantly!” Sweetie carefully inched her way around the mass of rock, and straddled the line between it and the gaping hole in the floor. “That was—h-hey! Are you alright?”
Twilight lay on her side, her hoof bleeding profusely, a crimson pool gathering under her leg. “Replica…” she moaned. “Replica…”
Sweetie Belle leaned down, prodding her side gingerly. “Twilight? Are you alright? You’re starting to scare me…”
Twilight lay motionless. Sweetie bit her lip, her eyes wide and wet. “I-I’m gonna go get help, Twilight, you’ll be okay, just don’t m—“
Twilight sat straight up, and Sweetie Belle let out her second scream of horror in the past minute.
“I-I’m fine, Sweetie,” she mumbled drunkly, lifting her good hoof to her face and feeling her cheeks. “I just need some bandages for my hoof, that’s all. I stepped on a jagged piece of crystal while teleporting the matter back into the room.”
Sweetie Belle stared at Twilight as she felt up her face. Twilight stared dead ahead, her lips moving slightly every second, but if noise came out, Sweetie did not hear it.
“The bandages are in the kitchen near the stove, Spike keeps a first aid kit nearby just in case,” Twilight deadpanned.
Sweetie nodded, and scampered away towards the kitchen, the sounds of her hooves echoing throughout the mostly empty castle.
Twilight’s hoof slowly dragged its way up her face, feeling her cheeks. They were flushed, but otherwise fine. She dragged them around her eyes—and poked herself by accident, causing the large orb to water. Nothing unusual there. Her hoof traced along her brow, feeling the bone ridge underneath. It was intact. Up through her mane, which was all there, unsinged… and she traced her hoof along her horn, feeling the contours and lines along it.
She brought her hoof down, and sighed. “I’m really sorry about all this, Sweetie, it’s just that—“
Twilight looked down at her hoof, something translucent and thin stuck to it. At first, she tilted her head, examining it with mild fascination, before a creeping, twisting feeling in her gut, like she had just swallowed a gallon of poison, spread chills through her.
It was a layer of her horn.
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I've not read this yet, but based upon the dark tag, the unicorn skull, and the two character tags I predict sunshine, happiness, and rainbows.
EDIT: Was lovely. Would recommend to a friend.
pssst
Might wanna reread that.
um, her horn's falling off? I don't get it. What was the obsidian replica? She just used too much magic? Something teleported her? Why did the ley line do all that to her? Is she a clone? Or, something?
You ran outta ink too, didn't ya ya basterds
6155450 fixed, thank you
Shit, you might wind up being the next Horse Voice yet.
Keep it up, squire.
Hmmm. This is interesting. I will have to fave this and see where it goes.
I just knew she was a herd blinker!
6157364 whoops, let me fix that
Nice work, Regi. Long way from Lyra chomping down on an Xbone.
6155545 Well, the story is not done yet, so I would suggest staying tuned
6157395 why must you bring up my past failures on every one of my (supposed) successes
I'm just gonna leave this here.
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You succeeded in bringing lulz. I'm just extracting more as I genuinely enjoy your new products. :)
This is really freaky, and it looks to only get even more creepy.
AGAIN! DO IT AGAIN!
Ooooo, a layer of her horn? That ain't good.
Nice job man! :D
Ag! Someone stole all the interest I had for pay with today!
... Oh, wait, never mind. You have it all. Can I have it back?
... No? Well, then I guess that I'll have to come back every chapter to ask for it. I mean, a night's worth of interest is pretty hard to come by, you know.
... I really need to sleep. I ramble when I'm tired.
IM totally creeped out now