Chapter 2
The little boy just sighed, his deadpan expression completely out of sync with his otherwise cherubic face.
“Took you long enough.”
“But... What…? How…? I mean… You... You’re tiny!” Pinkie Pie cried out as the recent revelation exploded inside her head and causing her eyes to bulge like a ballooning bullfrog.
“So it would seem,” Graves shrugged, the oversized T-shirt slipping off one little shoulder as he did. “I shrank. Or de-aged. Something like that.”
“Well I’ll be,” Applejack breathed in disbelief. “If that don’t jess beat all. Why, yer no bigger 'n knee-high to a grasshopper!”
“Yeah, you’re puny!” Rainbow Dash snickered, walking over so she could pat him on the head. “I guess I should stop calling you Big G, and start calling you Baby G!”
“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t,” the mini marshal grimaced, his childish voice doing nothing to lend his request weight. Naturally, the tomboy simply ignored him and continued patting his head, grinning like the Cheshire cat as if his noggin were an immensely amusing bouncy ball.
“Oh, please don’t do that,” Fluttershy pleaded as she fidgeted behind the cyan flier. “You need to be gentle with small creatures: they don’t like it when you hit them.”
“So I’m a small creature now,” the little boy muttered darkly. “Great.”
“Marshal, you know Fluttershy didn’t mean anything by that,” Rarity smiled as she swatted Rainbow Dash’s offending hand away. “I think we’re all just a little taken aback at your… dramatic makeover.”
“Yeah, how’d it happen anyway?” Pinkie Pie asked, literally bouncing in curiosity. “Last time we saw you, you were old, and I’ve never heard of an old person getting un-olded before. Hmm, un-olded. Is that a word? Olded? Un-olded? Olded? Un-olded?”
“I’ll let Twilight answer that,” Graves interjected before the tangent-prone baker could build up momentum. “Miss Sparkle, if you would?” The sweater-vested girl grinned sheepishly.
“Yeah, so it seems like I kind of maybe, possibly turned the marshal into a little kid. It was all by accident, of course,” she hastily added.
“Accident?” Applejack repeated. “Well how in tarnation do you ‘accidentally’ turn somebody into a little kid?”
“Well, it’s actually kind of a funny story…”
Earlier that Day:
“Twilight? You wanted to see me?”
“Graves! You made it!” the young librarian beamed as she flew around the room jotting notes, grabbing books, and mixing potions. “Thank you so much for coming today! I really needed your help with an experiment.”
“Er, what kind of experiment?” the marshal asked hesitantly. He hadn’t had many encounters with magical research and development, but the ones he had had been… interesting to say the least.
“Well, a while back,” she began, now tweaking a beaker that gave off sparkling purple smoke, “I found one of Starswirl the Bearded’s spells for time travel. Problem was, it only let you travel back for less than a minute, and even then, it could only be used once.”
“Okay…”
“That got me to thinking: was there a way to improve the spell? You know, make it last longer, multiple uses, those kinds of things. So I got to experimenting and I think I may have done it!”
“Great. So what do you need me for?” Graves asked, the hairs on the back of his neck starting to tingle. Twilight’s hesitant smile did nothing to assuage his worries.
“Okay, hear me out on this,” she said cautiously. “I’ve already used the spell, and I haven’t quite figured out the multi-use part yet. Spike’s a Salamander, which means he’s too magically resistant for a test run. So–”
“You want to use me as a guinea pig,” the marshal sighed wearily. Of course. He should have known.
“Please?” the little bookworm begged, her eyes big and sparkly with pleading intent. “I’m 99.8% sure that it’s safe, and I’m 99.995% sure that if anything happens, I can reverse it: it’s an experiment, so I’m only conducting it with a low level power, which is why I can’t use Spike.”
“So you decided to ask me?” he asked incredulously, the precision of her odds making him even warier than before.
“I need someone who can tell me how it went,” she smiled, a faint blush in her cheeks, “and I thought that a tough, ready-for-anything marshal would be the best bet?”
Graves almost smiled at that: compliments to butter him up. Still, regardless of ill-attempted flattery or not, he did owe her: after all, it had been Twilight who’d magically levitated the entire landslide out of the way to extract Rarity and him from the cave. And besides, refusing a girl with more raw power than any spell caster, shaman, or sorcerer in the last thousand years - minus a couple of princesses of course - was probably not the best idea.
“Only once, right?” he finally agreed, already sure he was going to regret his decision.
“Yes! Oh thank you thank you thank you!” Twilight squealed as she jumped around clapping her hands in delight. “Okay, you just stay there: I’ll get everything ready and we’ll get going right away!”
With a wave of her wand, an amethyst glow appeared on the ground and magic runes and circles began to form. The same lilac aura surrounded the various beakers of potion as they further traced the lines on the floor in magical brew.
“Okay, so here’s what’s going to happen,” Twilight announced while flipping through her notes. “I’m going to send you back in time sixteen minutes: I’ve also added in a teleportation spell so you end up on the second floor. Spike’s been up there all morning, so he’ll be there to take notes on anything you notice in transit. Any questions?”
“Just one,” Graves said. “Why sixteen?”
“Time seems to like multiples of twos,” Twilight shrugged. “Can’t say why.”
“Huh. Well I’ll be.”
“Alright, so are we ready to go?” the young librarian eagerly asked. The marshal sighed.
“Ready as I’ll ever be.”
“Great! Then here we go!”
Violet lightning crackled around Twilight as she began charging energy for the task. The runes on the ground began to glow, each arcane symbols shining with a different color till the whole room glowed like a rainbow. The humming of contained power grew to a deafening pitch till finally, eyes glowing with pure white light, Twilight unleashed the spell.
One blinding flash later, and Graves was gone. It’s important to note however, that this quite literally meant that only the marshal was gone, meaning he had left behind some rather important souvenirs.
“Oh boy, I think I might have missed something,” Twilight grimaced as she picked up the marshal’s hat and pants from where they lay on the floor. “This was definitely not supposed to happen.”
“Uh, Twilight?” Spikes voice called from the top of the stairs, “You said Graves was coming over to help you out, right?”
“Yeah? Why?” she called back as a sinkhole quickly formed in the pit of her stomach.
“… I think you’re gonna wanna see this for yourself.”
*****
Present:
“Which brings us to here and now,” Twilight finished. “Or at least, until I sent Spike over to Rarity’s. Then you guys show up. So I guess it does take us right to now.”
“I still don’t get it,” Applejack interjected with brow furrowed in confusion. “How’d yeh go get a time travel spell to turn the marshal into a little kid?”
“Well, Applejack,” Twilight began, unable to resist giving a lecture despite the circumstance, “I believe it has something to do with the runes I used. A small transcription error translated sixteen minutes into sixteen years, and by using the subjunctive on the line on Conjuring and Conflux instead of the indicative, I temporally altered his physical form instead of physically altering his temporal status.”
“… So, in English?” Applejack asked again. Twilight sighed.
“I messed up the spell and time got all… wobbly. So, Graves is now a little kid.” The other girls stood around, just blinking, till Rainbow Dash finally shrugged.
“Meh, works for me.”
“Well, what do we do now?” Fluttershy asked Twilight, though the little boy drew her eyes like a lodestone drew iron dust: her love of all things small and adorable was making it very hard to concentrate. “I mean, Mister Graves is very cute and all, but I doubt he wants to stay like this and have to grow up a second time.”
“Go through puberty twice?” the marshal shuddered. “No thanks.”
“Don’t worry, you won’t have to,” the librarian assured him, flicking her wand and summoning over half a dozen texts that she seemed to be reading simultaneously. “It’ll take a bit of doing, but I should be able to rewrite the spell and completely reverse it, bringing you back to your normal age.”
“And… how long's that gonna take?” Spike asked dubiously: he knew where he’d be through the entire process.
“A few hours at most,” Twilight answered as she waved her wand again and began mixing various levitating bottles of potion. “If all goes according to plan – and it should this time – I’ll have the reversal spell ready by this afternoon.”
“Great,” Graves nodded, his shirt almost slipping off again. “What do I do till then?”
“Ooh, ooh, pick me! Pick me!” Pinkie Pie called out as she frantically waved her arm in the air. Twilight just gave her a curious look.
“Um… okay. Pinkie?”
“How about we babysit him for you?” she grinned, her smile splitting her face like a kung fu chop to a ripe coconut. “We could totally take Baby G around town and keep him out of trouble while you work!”
At first, everyone joined in staring at Pinkie Pie as they always did when she went off on one of her crazy tangents. However, one by one the girls all broke out into the same, mischievous smiles as they each caught on to the idea.
“First, don’t call me that,” the little boy grimaced, oblivious to the grins passing above his head: he wasn’t used to having to look up to people. “And second, I’m older than you: I can take care of myself.”
“You were older than us,” Rarity corrected as she schooled her face into a serene smile. “And as odd as that was to say, since you are currently a child, I’m afraid you will have to be treated as such.”
“What?” Graves sputtered, though it came out more like a squeak, “but… you know me: I don’t need a babysitter!”
“Normally, I’d believe yeh,” Applejack nodded, her grin now tweaked to look just slightly apologetic, “but it’d just break mah heart if we let such a cute little feller like you run off 'n get hurt.”
“Oh my, yes,” Fluttershy agreed in a tone suitable for placating newborns, “We wouldn’t want you to get any bumpy wumpies on your adowable widdle head, now would we?”
“Yeah, totally,” Rainbow Dash snorted, “bumpy wumpies on your… adowable…widdle…” the cyan flyer couldn’t contain it anymore and burst out into peals of raucous laughter.
This was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Unable to contain themselves any more, the other four girls all burst out into side splitting laughter as well. Graves just stared at them – tears streaming and sides clutched – as shock spread all over his ‘adowable’ little face.
“I don’t believe this,” he gaped. “You’re actually enjoying this.”
“Aw, it’s not like that, sugar cube,” Applejack wheezed in a very unconvincing manner. “We jess figured that given a mighty peculiar situation like this, we might as well have fun with it.”
“Depends on what you mean by fun,” the mini marshal muttered sullenly, which simply prompted Fluttershy to pick him up in a big, squishy hug.
“Well it looks like somebody’s getting grumpy wumpy,” she cooed in the same infantile tone as before. “Maybe you should take a nap before we go play, hmm?”
“No!” Graves screeched, tiny arms flailing as he futilely fought to escape Fluttershy’s expertly inescapable embrace. “No nap times, no babysitting, no nothing! You can’t do this to me!”
“So where should we take the little guy first?” Rainbow Dash asked, completely ignoring the little boy’s protests.
“Ooh, can we go to my boutique?” Rarity jumped in eagerly. “This is the perfect opportunity to try out my hand at making children’s clothes, and I have the perfect idea on how to dress up little Gravy Wavy.”
Good lord, it was getting worse.
“Twilight, please,” Graves implored with horror stricken eyes. “You can’t let them take me away!” His cries fell on deaf ears, however, as the young scholar was already lost in her work.
“Alrighty then!” Pinkie Pie cheered as she led the charge towards the door. “Next stop, Rarity’s shop and Baby G’s adorable new duds!”
“Nooooooooooooooo!!!”
The very young marshal’s last, lingering cries were cut off as the door to the library finally closed. For a moment, Spike contemplated the door and thought of going after them. Then he simply shrugged.
“Hey, better him than me.”
And with that, he went to help Twilight with her work.
**********
.... ACCURSED SQUEAKY STEVEN BLUM!!!!!!
.... and featured 7:22pm CST
AND THEN THEY ALL FUCKED. The end!
Seriously though, I ca't wait to see where this goes. Especially if the Doctor ends up helping Twiight. HINT HINT.
Lol I can tell this is gonna be funny. GIVE MORE!
Poor Graves.
This is hilarious! Love Little Gravey-Wavey!
When he gets bigger, he should make an example of them and arrest them all for kidnapping.
I have to admit... that last part cracked me up
First I was like:
then I was like:
Then I was like: ...
LOLOLOL EVERYONE IS A TROLL
Here lies Graves, in a grave, killed by 5 girls fussing over him. Beside him lie the said 5 girls, whom all had heart attacks over seeing Graves in a baby outfit.
Graves you gotta get them back after this.
“I don’t believe this,” he gaped. “You’re actually enjoying thing.”
You might've meant gasped? But I guess gaped would work too. Good thing there's another typo, so I won't be 100% wrong!
Oh god a fate worse than death
MOAR
That is... CRUEL... and... UNUSUAL... punishment... the poor man! Run Graves! RUN FOR THE HILLS!
I am kinda expecting him to make a run for it. They might be bigger and older than him 'technically' sense he knows who he is and who they are he has all the skills and memories of his older self... RUN FOR THE HILLS!
863281
Graves is currently a child and the others are all young adults so um you do realize what you just implied right?
880494
All true, but how do you run away when you've only got short, stubby kid legs?
He never stood a chance.
881483 Yes. Yes I do
In my defense, that seems to be the main premises of a good number of fanfics, though the kid is normally Spike...
MOOOAAARRR!!!
THIS IS GONNA BE GOOD
882663
Maybe not in the library... but I'm sure he might be able to slip away at some point! xD Plus if he's a little kid doesn't he have endless waves of energy to use? xD
NO! GRAVES!
WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!
-Delta-
Please tell me Graves is gonna get them back so incredibly hard. Ooh! Ooh! Perhaps have the reversal spell make Graves his normal self again AND make the other mane 6 (Twi not included ofcourse) young! Or older!
“You’re actually enjoying thing.”
I think you mean this...
"...which simply prompted Fluttershy to pick him up in a big, squishy hug."
"...big, squishy hug."
"...squishy..."
Want.
WANT.
WANT.
ALL OF MY WANT.
ALL OF IT.
LeafBug you read my mind.
...could be worse. They could introduce him to the crusaders...though, whether that'd be worse for him or THEM remains to be seen.
Yes, Graves: They're all evil; they're women and that means they're evil. And, what is worse, they'll make you thank them for their evil.
Deal with it.
I can't help but imagine how hilariously similar Graves was acting to Stewie Griffin from Family Guy.
1329081 Damn you all! The world is mine!
I don't know if you've seen black cat but this reminds me of when Train was transformed into a kid and had to protect a bunch of orphans from mobsters
If only there was somebody around who knew about all that wibbly wobbly...timey wimey stuff...some sort of doctor I suppose...
I think I realized that there was a tiny bit of foreshadowing to this at the end of the chapter with Applebloom.
Graves, it could be worse.
Cinnamon Swirl. That's all I need to say.
Im pretty sure using the subjunctive on conjuring and conflux would alter the temporal status and indicative would be physical form. But I don't know anything about magic from TV shows so I cant say if you were referring to something. However I do know grammar and indicative is more literal and physical is more literal than temporal
Assuming Grave had his wand-gun-thing on him, and that he knows teleport spells, why didn't he just do that?
I hope Twilight took notes on that screwed-up rune circle. Using it, if she becomes a princess in THIS storyline she could use it to make all her friends young virtually forever.
Of course that would eventually end up in the forbidden knowledge section. Can't have EVERYbody living forever, now can we?
Now i'm picturing Twilight as a Time Lord. I think reality just shuddered.
The urge to kill rising...
2807538 Hey, what do you call him when Graves is relaxed? Marshal Mellow!
I don't know if time travel is the best for stories to many complications like wouldn't it have already have happened and why does Graves still act like an adult if the spell pushed his age back 16 years. But the ending is hilarious and really makes it.
WIBBLY- WOBBLY TIMEY -WIMEY
I'm fucking terrified. No seriously this is a crippling fear of mine. Humiliation and age regression. I AM GOING TO HAVE NIGHTMARES ABOUT THIS. Can I please have an apology or something to soothe my shattered mind?
Seriously I'm scared shitless. Only way it could possibly be worse is if they made him poop I a diaper. Really author you've scared me badly.
Now, to explain my great hate for the characters for the time being is to break a person's mind. I can't believe this.
Oh, Christ, Dude, RUN AND DON'T LOOK BACK!
Dang Spike, that's cold man.
But Spike! Bro Code! Bros before hos!
Time is a big ball of wibly wobly timey-wimey.... stuff...
6145932
I actually told my older brother that once and he gave me the 'what the fuck' look.
One of these days, Twilight is going to learn that just because she could theoretically do anything with magic doesn't mean she should. At all!
4739335
she has the time stone