Pinkie (re)Curses A Lot

by scifipony

Crisis: Past Perfect Tense

This keeping of secrets was proving super hard, harder than a Pinkie Promise. I really wished I hadn't heard the insidious gem in the first place.

I mused about it because it kept my mind from straying to thinking about what Twilight, Cadance, or Shining Armor would think when they found out. The only way I would not have found out is if I had not been so silly about preening after nearly beating my record for frosting cupcakes. I had known ahead of time how many were there: too few. I should have just finished the job and gone to clean the frosting bags and mixing bowls because, well, not-a-record was not-a-record.

Or… I could have gone and fetched a half-dozen cupcakes from another order. I could imagine realizing I could break my record by one cupcake. I would finish the count, gasp, and walk back into the storefront.

And crash into Mrs. Cake carrying the secret-laden scroll, coming from the storefront.

Buzz. Nope.

Better: I would turn around, exit through the kitchen, out the back door, and around the outside to the restaurant entrance. Then I'd never see the note at all.

The should-have-been was so vivid that there I was, almost breaking my personal cupcake-icing record! "You know, Gummy, there's a dozen more cupcakes for that other order in the front refrigerator case; all I have to do is go and get them!"

But as I turned toward the kitchen door, the opposite way from the door to the storefront, it was like some super powerful magnet had me in its super powerful magnetic field. Going away proved incredibly hard. Even the air seemed to gel, but I could hear Mrs. Cake's hoofbeats approaching and I knew I had just seconds. I put every bit of effort I could into to turning,

and turning,

and stretching,

and pushing until I stretched what felt like the elastic holding me back to its greatest unyielding extent.

Snap!

I blasted into hyper-hoof, slamming the kitchen door open and burning skid marks across the kitchen tiles as I turned right toward the back door, hitting the door while still going too fast, throwing it open, but catching the jamb so I flung myself across the front of Sugarcube Corner—only to collide into something strong and furry that suddenly appeared in my way with a vacuum-lightning sound not unlike a teleportation pop.

We tumbled docks over fetlocks and landed tangled up in the bushes out front.

"I say! What am I doing here?"

"Time Turner! I'm sorry."

"Call me doc," he said, clambering up and dusting himself off. He glanced up at the sunny sky. "It looks like it's not even an hour past dawn. That's very strange." He put on horn-rimmed glasses, examined me, then peered at the Ponyville clock tower. "I've definitely lost some time here."

"Yeah," I said, "I was just thinking through how I could prevent a problem that occurred from occurring, and seem to have succeeded since it's again this morning."

He looked back to me, then gazed into the packing room. My magnificent stack of 568 cupcakes filled one wall. Oddly, though, in front of it stood a strange pink pony with dark pink curly hair and a chef's hat. She held an unrolled scroll, reading it, growing more shocked by the word.

"Great Whickering Stallions!" Time Turner cried, strangling the sound so it didn't carry. He tackled me to the ground just as my doppelgänger started to lower the paper.

"Who are you? I mean, you're Pinkie, but she's Pinkie too. How can there be two of you? It's not scientifically possible. You are not scientifically possible! Unless— you're a temporal anomaly! Don't you know you can't be in same place as yourself at the same time?" He shoved me hard, and got me trotting away from the store. He forced me into a gallop until I was turning the corner and almost a block away.

Breathless, he continued, "You'll cause a temporal shift, or worse, a rift through which reality will begin to bleed into a singularity. Time could begin running sideways; who knows what might slip through the rift? This could get—"

"—super bad?" We stopped. Ponies on their morning rounds waved as they walked past. I said, "Okay. It doesn't feel bad, now, but— I mean, I didn't understand a word you said, but—"

He started pacing around me, studying me with big eyes through the coke-bottle lenses. "No devices or enchanted time pieces. You don't have an implant, do you?"

"Implant?"

"Something under the skin. Or a clock that you swallowed?"

"Haven't swallowed a clock since I was a foal."

He snapped closed the temples of his glasses, then tapped his forehead with them. "Think, think, think. Cor! Muffin was going on about Princess Cadance having a baby. But I thought it might be a rumor. And now I remember her doing that another time, but it was almost like it was a dream. You're doing something, aren't you?"

"Not than I'm aware of."

"Follow me to my place. I have a temporal thermometer I built from spare parts. That'll give me an answer. What were you doing anyway that caused you to run away from yourself?"

"Just trying to not learn a secret that I would not be able to keep. Although, from the look of things, my other me just learned it anyway and is probably already experiencing a mental meltdown."

"How did you do it? I mean, make the two of you?"

"That I don't know."

"So when did things start acting strange?"

"Not counting the secret, it's been a pretty normal day, really. Nothing out of the ordinary."

"But something happened!"

"Other than blurting the secret out to Rarity, who would have helped me keep it without letting more ponies hear it, and then having Sweetie Belle overhear it and run with it, and me thinking how it would have been better if I'd told her earlier about some juicy gossip that would have kept her occupied so she'd not be there to overhear, but when I did tell her some juicy gossip instead—"

"Wait, what?"

"You know Cadance's secret, don't you?" It was getting out no matter what. My hooves felt leaden again as I clopped along.

"Candance. Foal. Yes, but I won't tell. How did you change what happened?"

I took a breath. "Did I? It looks like" and I could imagine it, "that my blabbing is inevitable. Cadance and Shining Armor will arrive at the castle and there I'll be, super worried that all the leaks and blurts will have gotten to them. Probably, no likely, my friends will have been so busy preparing for their royal guests that they will be in the castle no wiser, but I will be bursting to relay the secret, and sick and visibly stricken, possibly visibly pale and shaking.

"Rainbow Dash will be telling me—