Conversation 1: Mary
The Unlimited Library is a marvelous, magical place, which I very much don’t recommend visiting, unless you’re into soul crushing existential dread. Kind of like Tahiti in that regard. It’s not entirely apparent at first, just books everywhere you can see, for miles and miles, an Archimedean screw of a floor that seems to extend upwards and downwards into infinity. The dread only sets in when you are told that it contains, by definition, every story ever thought of. It’s not that somebody actually collects them here, no, that’s just how it works. While the realization of my own mortality has faded enough to be banal by now, it cannot possibly compare to the realization of my own insignificance in the grand scheme of things, let alone the absence of any such scheme, and this is exactly what seeing “about five quintillion” worth of stories does to you.
It is further compounded by the realization of humanity’s insignificance – all its worlds combined, and all the starfish aliens thrown in for good measure – when it becomes apparent that five quintillion really is not the infinity you actually expected. Not to mention that this cylindrical structure is only approximately as tall as the distance between Earth and the Moon, and doesn’t rate much even if you compare it to the size of the solar system as a whole.
All that before you realize that the place is actually much less real, than the stories it contains. Some parts of it are more abstract than set theory, and the spot at the top where it grows is more like group theory than anything else.
In short, whenever I visit the place, I shiver every time I look up – or down, for that matter – and no amount of tea helps, not that anyone here beside me knows the first thing about tea. Oh, most of the locals drink it, to be sure, but for reasons entirely unrelated to tea itself.
“Mary, are you planning to get lost? Searching for you is not the kind of adventure I had in mind. Get in here,” Rika beckoned me from somewhere between the labyrinthine shelves.
My …friend, the eldritch abomination. When she stepped into my life one day – out of a wall, no less – I thought I finally went insane. Which seemed more than likely back then. But every time she looks at me with those perpetually curious deep green eyes of hers, and opens her mouth to nonchalantly utter yet another world shattering revelation, I wonder whether it’s the universe that’s insane instead. The premature grey hairs I get from knowing her don’t stand out too much only because I’m a natural blond.
She scares me even more than the Library, but you have probably guessed as much.
“So, what exactly did you have in mind, anyway?” I asked. If it weren’t for the faint glow of her long, wispy, fire truck red hair, illuminating the vicinity, I wouldn’t be able to find her in this dark corner, because the mourning black dress she habitually wears is almost impossible to pick out in the darkness the moment she steps away from the railing. I still have no idea why she is so fixated on this color scheme when she could look like absolutely anything. What a walking cliché…
Actually, I’m not much better when it comes to being a cliché, so I probably shouldn’t complain.
“Take a look,” Rika grinned back at me. “I’ve collected most of the phase space for this tree,” she added, running her gloved hand across the bookends. The titles, liberally mentioning ponies and sprinkled with horse-related puns failed to inspire me. In theory, I’m supposed to have been born in the day and age when every little girl dreamed of riding a pony, and quite a lot of them did. In practice, that’s not the day and age I remember at all.
The prodigious quantity was even less appealing. I wondered, just how did she manage to haul in what looks like a million books from all over the Library – I know by now, that different branches of the same tree do not get shelved next to each other naturally, you have to search for them, and so far, nobody deduced the pattern they appear in. She had to have sifted through at least a trillion books to do this. Then I remembered that this way lies madness and tried to concentrate on something less brain-melting. “I like ponies…” I said uncertainly, “but I’m sure I couldn’t eat a whole one.”
She snickered, “Aw come on, it will be fun. The biggest tree I know with a primarily non-humanoid population. Pastel-colored ponies with big eyes, just about everyone is nice, magic, apple pie, friendship. Like Flonyard, but much more variety and no emphasis on underwear. Pick one.”
Oh, I know a few things about ponies. It’s certainly not my field, but back home – I’ve spent so much effort trying to create that timeline, I’ve actually succeeded, so I’m going to call it my home and won’t let anyone tell you different – I’ve met quite a few people who wouldn’t shut up whenever ponies were mentioned, and you can’t deny cultural osmosis. Especially if you’re trying to get used to another culture, which was what I was doing at the time. What I don’t get is what Rika expects to do there, which makes me suspect that this whole “I make your miracle, you go on an adventure with me” deal has far more layers to it than I was counting on.
But none of the titles stood out. At least, not to my normal eye. The right eye, the golden parasite, had its own opinion, as always – it marked one of the books as shimmering, as if it were highlighted by a cursor. Whatever. “This one,” I said, reaching for the book and handing it to Rika.
She opened it up and skimmed it through in under a second, like a dealer shuffling a deck – br-r-r-r-t. “Yes, this one should be fun,” she said, handing it back to me with yet another grin, which did little, if anything, to dissolve my worries.
Speaking of worries. “I hope it won’t turn me into a pony,” I said, poking her with a finger for punctuation.
“You’d make a cute one!” Rika smiled right back. “But no, not unless you want it to.”
“…Okay, here goes nothing,” I said, opening the book at random somewhere in the middle and started reading: “Once upon a time…”
✶ ✶ ✶
Once upon a time, in the magical land of Equestria, two human, or at least, human-looking girls were walking along the streets of the town called Ponyville, weaving their way through the twisty maze of wide streets and little back alleys, all alike, while leisurely maintaining a conversation.
“They don’t seem to be too happy to see us,” I noticed, looking at the colorful ponies peeking at us from the windows and quietly, but very deliberately clearing the street in our path – without any obvious panic, but definitely not ignoring us altogether. This looked particularly amusing whenever we came to a crossroads, because they would all stare and wait until Rika would pick where to turn.
Now that I had a chance to see ponies when they weren’t rendered in vector artwork, the first thing to notice was that their proportions weren’t quite as profoundly exaggerated as I remembered. At least, the eyes left much more space for a brain inside their heads than the drawings would suggest. The second was the nearly universal appearance of saddlebags, ridicules, shoulder baggies, purses, pouches, neck-mounted portmanteaus of the style so popular with hippies in the 80s, and just about every other style of wearable container I could imagine being applicable to pony shape, as well as some I never expected to see, like purses mounted on hair clips and ribbons. Distance not to scale. Damn, this story has a serious case of Aragorn’s pants…
“I imagine the reaction in Manehattan would be different. Most of the unannounced non-pony visitors to this town are giant monsters from Everfree,” Rika commented, smiling and waving at a passing earth pony filly with a dark coat and glasses. This had the result opposite to intended, judging by the filly letting out a muffled shriek and darting behind a house. Rika just turned to me with an annoyed scowl on her face.
“You fit that description perfectly!” I snickered.
“I’m not giant!” she protested.
“Could have fooled me,” I said, looking up. She’s at least a head taller than I am. Granted, I’m actually quite short, but the tips of pony ears appear to reach no higher than my chest. “Certainly fooled …er …what’s the word… Everypony, right.”
“Oh never mind…” she sighed. “This is actually one of the quirks of this tree. High mainline decoherence, branch variability off the charts. There’s at least a 15% chance a unicorn named Lyra Heartstrings will come by asking about hands, regardless of anything else. A 30% chance human visitors are treated as a threat, which usually doesn’t last very long, 40% chance they’re treated as guests right off the bat. In 3% of the branches they’re an object of intense interest due to technology contamination, and the rest is all over the place.”
“Don’t most of them turn into ponies on entry, though?” I wondered.
“About 60%, but that doesn’t correlate very well even with Lyra. If she hears the visitor had hands, she might come by asking about them anyway,” Rika said. How exactly does she collect all these little factoids is beyond me. Did she really survey the entire tree? Time in the Library is very broken, but I can’t really imagine her spending two weeks to read a million books back to back just to drag me somewhere. “And there’s no apparent correlation between transformation and whether Newtonian physics actually works on large scales or not, that’s still a toss-up,” she added.
That got me to raise an eyebrow. “Works or not?!”
Rika grinned smugly. “Well, the root of this tree is a myth.”
“A cartoon for little girls, you mean,” I said uncertainly.
“They aren’t mutually exclusive,” she replied, pointing upwards, “This here is the sun. And it could be a star, a painting on a celestial sphere, an artificial bubble of magic, any combination of the three, or something else entirely. One branch had an ancient spaceship towing the planet somewhere. Even the ponies don’t necessarily know. I’ve read the entire book and I still don’t know. You have already branched it off, so whatever you discover, will have been the truth forever.” Her eyes were positively sparkling. “That’s what makes this tree so special!”
A nagging realization rose up in the back of my head and knocked on the walls of my skull. Whatever you discover. Which implies that she’s planning to stay on the sidelines and watch me suffer, while I muddle about like an elephant in a school’s science supplies closet. “This is an experiment, right?”
“Guilty as charged,” Rika said, “I want to see what you can do from inside, this time. Don’t tell me this won’t be an adventure.”
I bit my lip in apprehension, but Rika continued, “You can go home at any moment, you know. I won’t keep you. But I will admit that without you I’ll be bored. Even in the worst of times, I would find less to do here than anywhere else.”
I just sighed. I could go home. I would have to pester Dorothy or Pandora to help me find the right page, but I could leave… at the cost of even more awkward, like having to explain what happened. “You’re impossible.”
“I am,” she agreed immediately. “Sorry about dragging you into this, I didn’t expect you’d hate it so much.”
“I don’t hate it,” I protested. She isn’t that sorry, anyway. “It’s just… well, can’t you be slightly clearer about what you really want? Preferably in advance? So that I could do some research?… Oh never mind… Give me the short version.”
She looked at me, puzzled. “Of what?”
“Of the events so far, you duffer! I didn’t see anything beyond the cover,” I exclaimed, waving a hand in the direction of further ponies hiding in the nearby bushes. “We’re in Ponyville, ok. When? How?”
“Oh. That,” Rika said. “The mainline divergence is somewhere between the first meeting with Trixie – you remember Trixie, right? – and the moment she comes back with her revenge amulet, but it wasn’t clearly marked. The amulet gets superseded by Trixie getting drafted to be Luna’s personal dream student, which boosts the rivalry to epic proportions and culminates with fighting Discord a second time for no adequately explained reason. You somehow managed to backtrack to well before the beginning of the core narrative, so it’s a week or two until the royal wedding right now. You might not have noticed, but it actually took me some time to find you.”
I smiled. “Well, I did say ‘Once upon a time’. That wasn’t what was written on the page I opened.”
“Tsk, tsk,” she said, “What am I to do with you?”
I was about to launch into a long tirade, but since we were already right next to the door to the Golden Oak Library, decided against it. “If you’re treating it as a long-term expedition, I need a base. And financing.”
Rika glanced at me suspiciously. “How do you usually do that without me, anyway?”
“Shorting and compound interest,” I replied tersely. “Also, I will need these books… from a sane place, please,” I said, pulling out my tiny notebook and jotting down a few titles.
Rika laughed as she read the note I gave her. “Want a Wikipedia dump to go with that?” she said, waving the note in the air. “What are you really planning to do, start a book club?”
“Don’t be silly. A book is the best gift,” I said didactically. That this is a tired old propaganda slogan does not make it any less appropriate for my current situation.
She grinned at me. “Later. Right now, I need to go give my regards to the princesses.” In the next moment, Rika vanished in a silent white flash, eliciting muffled whispers from the ponies hiding behind the nearby houses.
“And leave me to pick up the mess, why don’t you…” I mumbled, pausing to determine a course of action and spinning around, looking at the “hidden” ponies, whose eyes seemed less anxious and more curious by the minute. What, exactly, would I do, given the chance to influence a world in which even the laws of physics are, from my perspective, undefined? Towards what end would I twist it? Do I even want to twist it? It seems perfectly fine as it is, amazing as it sounds. But is it? To begin with, what do I actually know about it?
Looking up, I spied an almost familiar shape of a wisteria unicorn – lavender is such a tired word and covers too many shades, and this one is the closest – on the library’s balcony. The golden eye even decided it was an appropriate time to show a title card. Yes, whenever it sees someone important for the first time, I get a title card, introducing them in a language I can’t even reproduce on paper, much less understand. Takes the fun out of interacting with large numbers of new people very quickly.
Well, the first step towards knowledge is asking the librarian, and this fulcrum is so blindingly obvious, that even Rika has to have noticed it. Otherwise, why would she lead me straight to her doorstep before running off. “Miss Twilight Sparkle,” I shouted, “if I might be permitted to infringe upon your time…”
It wasn’t long before the wisteria head with midnight blue mane peeked over the railing to gaze at me. And before she had time to open her mouth, I continued, as inspiration struck me. “Can you tell me, who invented the sandwich?”
And then immediately regretted it. Couldn’t I think of something actually neutral to ask about?
Regardless, the expression of extreme bewilderment on the face peeking above the railing – or is it supposed to be called a muzzle, anyway? I’ll go with a face – was absolutely priceless.
“May I come in?” I added.
The only response was a vigorous, repeating, high frequency nod.
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Two paragraphs in and I'm hooked. Blimey. This deserves more everything. This is much the kind of thing I try to write, and fail miserably. You lucky* swine.
*Hardworking.
10**18 stories seems a bit low, especially if you are including starfish aliens.
6891334
There is a specific reason why the number is so low, which will eventually come up. It'll be quite a while before it does, though.
This is amazingly good to start with. I don't know how long it'll be before I have time to read the whole thing properly, but just from the first chapter have a all my thumbs up. This desperately needs more eyes on it.
I'll see what I can do about that.
7002257
Thank you. This means a lot coming from an acknowledged master such as yourself.
Judging from the stats, though, most people do get bored a few chapters in and leave, and even I feel it's taking too long to get to the point sometimes. At least, I can promise the three actual primary plot threads start in chapters 5, 9 and 11 respectively...
Oh, wow. I'm impressed! Very engaging and well-written so far. Definitely worth a thumbs-up and a favorite.
Right now, I'm kinda curious as to the backstory of Rika and Mary.
Would there be another location with earlier, non-pony related stories containing this pair or is this their first written expedition?
7123874 I'm curious too... If you meant to start this in media res, it's done pretty well but could maybe stand a bit more explanation. It definitely hooked me, though!
7123874
7124459
Not really, I’m afraid. They were both supposed to be heroines of their own stories, which, for different reasons, were never written, never completed or never properly published. Rika exists through scraps of barely comprehensible shorts since at least 2003.¹ Mary was supposed to have her own book which she’s the invisible² heroine of. They do have quite a bit of backstory together, which likewise, was never written.
I am planning to keep Aporia entirely self-contained, though, which is why all the relevant parts will eventually come up. After all, even if they don’t agree, this story is about them just as much as it is about ponies. :)
The opening paragraph made it very hard not to go away and reread "Librarians in the Branch Library of Babel", but it was worth it. The sandwich question! so mean to ask someone in a setting with no established reason for John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich to exist.
7126075
Thanks for telling me about this little gem, I was not aware it existed.
Well... yes. ;)
Had this one on my RL list for awhile now, figured I should check it out. Just the description alone reminded me of the metaworld mechanics of Umineko No Naku Koro Ni, and reading the first chapter only reinforced that.
If by some chance you're not familiar with When They Cry and came up with this all independently I would be quite impressed, but either way I am intrigued enough to continue
7201190
My implementation of these metaworld mechanics predates Umineko by about five years, but I'm familiar with Umineko. :)
That said, I can't say I came up with this idea completely independently, there are much earlier examples, and I never found how deep this particular rabbit hole really goes. My guess is, the earliest precursors are somewhere in XIX century.
Finally started on this piece, and I'm excited to see where it leads, and the world Oliver is building.
Interesting. It sounds like here, "hammer space" isn't really a thing (except for maybe Pinkie), and instead various containers are simply invisible on the show, like genitalia?
Also, I tried googling "Aragorn's pants," and I found nothing. What does it refer to?
7224028
Mostly, yes.
A joke goes that nowhere in the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy Aragorn's pants are referred to. Therefore he never wore any and pants are not canon. :)
7224283
*rereads trilogy*
Holy shit you're right! Well that puts an entirely new twist on the story...
Also, where the fuck did the backstory for your work come from, is there a prequel? Or am i being dumb? Or both?
7514964
There are no prequels. The characters had stories planned for them - but I never wrote them, for one reason or another.
Hm. Well written, but strange.
Intriguing.
I mean i'm most likely being an idiot. But i'm not even sure whats happening
This also confuses. I know the description of the story saids she is a time travel. But does she not remember when she was born or something. At first i thought Mary used to be Twiglight or something. I'm gonna continue reading. But the first chapter alone confused me a lot
7666789
Mary explains how the time she remembers is entirely not what everyone else thinks happened much later, in Conversation 20. :)
I am unable to discern what these container items are. Could you show me any examples, please?
7727799
Reticules (Mary is not using the correct spelling) are a subspecies of handbag.
Substituting “wallet” for “portmanteau” will easily turn up a modern equivalent, they still make them. Original hippie neck wallets were typically fancier.
The particular choice of those words is not an error, though. :)
HaHA!, this looks to be fun
Also, after a brief moment of contemplation, for the life of me I can't remember how I got linked/recced here.
Ah! it looks like a Tree/trees to you too? what a small world. Is the orchard gated, or have people been carrying off saplings and leaving them in random places?
7126525
THAT ("Librarians in the Branch Library of Babel") was a really interesting read.
Yea, I wonder: what answer were Ted/Carol looking for from our narrator? What adventures are they onto next?