I balanced the sandwich on my hoof and licked my lips.
Next to me, Twilight was still droning on. “—but this journal only brought new puzzles, as if the whole Sandwich Problem wasn’t hard enough already!” she said. Her glance drifted across my sandwich and she jerked, like she just saw a poisonous snake. Well, too bad, more sandwiches for me.
“Why don’t ya just ask the Princess?” Applejack asked.
“Don’t you get it?” Twilight said, throwing her hooves up. “She said it was a quest, you don’t come back to say ‘please explain the next clue to me’ after that.”
“Well, if ya say so,” Applejack replied without any particular enthusiasm, pulling the plate with her slice of the cake closer. “Would’a saved us a lot of time an’ effort, if ya didn’t treat it like homework, I reckon.”
“It’s not homework, Applejack,” Twilight pressed. “It’s research. Just like a Daring Do adventure, too, I spent years dreaming of something like that. If I ask the Princess, either she tells me everything, and then there’s no adventure, or I just embarrass myself. It’s considered very impolite to ask her directly about early Equestria. I don’t know why, but it just is, I got away with more questions than anypony I know.”
The picnic started regular enough, but Twilight was determined to talk about every single boring part of the castle adventure and the book we found, leaving out all the awesome stuff and chewing theories instead. She was actually in danger of permanently decreasing the coolness of our favorite picnic spot. Until they figure out something, I’d rather take a nap.
But I’ll finish the sandwich, first.
I looked across the blanket at Fluttershy, and found her staring into the ground and munching on a cookie with a blank face, surrounded by her favorite birds, who were patiently waiting for crumbs to drop. She’s been completely out of it ever since the Canterlot trip, but getting her to talk about what’s troubling her has always been really hard. Guess I’ll just have to wait until she finally collects the courage to spell it out or the problem solves itself. I’ve been watching her closely the entire time, but it’s not something as easy to see as flight school bullies.
“And we also need to find Trixie!” Pinkie piped up.
“Why the hay would we ever want to find Trixie?” Twilight asked, narrowing her eyes. “I’d be much happier if I never met her again, I plan to talk straight to Princess Luna instead.”
“Because Trixie skipped out on her official ‘Welcome to Ponyville’ Pinkie Pie Party. TWICE!” Pinkie waved two hooves in the air. I have seen her wave five hooves this way, once, it was very confusing.
“Sorry to interrupt, Pinkie, but is she even eligible for that?” Rarity wondered. “She never moved to Ponyville, I thought you didn’t throw parties for every random visitor.”
“She left her wagon here,” Pinkie insisted, tapping the ground with a hoof. “That counts!”
“What’s left of her wagon, you mean,” Rarity clarified.
Pinkie nodded excitedly, “That’s what I said!”
Rarity sighed, but found nothing to say, and instead chose to adjust her gigantic hat and pour herself another cup of tea. “So, what sort of a puzzle did the journal introduce?” she asked, looking at Twilight.
Twilight sighed right back. “It’s a fake, and it was hidden in the secret room relatively recently. But it’s written by a filly with no cutie mark, who somehow saw Equestria before Discord’s original rampage and knew things no filly could.”
“I don’t get it,” I commented. What’s with them both, it started out as such a nice picnic?…
“I don’t either,” Twilight said, cutting a slice of cake for herself. “And neither does Mary. The list of things we could figure out about it is really just a list of things we don’t know.”
“Time travel again?” I suggested. It sure turns up often these days.
“Or retrocognition, or something, no idea,” Twilight replied, folding her ears and staring at her cake. “Not enough information. I’m not even sure if this is really connected to the Sandwich Problem or not, but it’s one hay of a coincidence for this journal to turn up now, not to mention there.”
“I don’t see why the sandwich should be a problem, darling,” Rarity smiled.
Twilight frowned at her. “Haven’t you been listening?”
“Oh, of course I have, Twilight,” Rarity said. “I just can’t help but feel you’re digging yourself into a hole. So we’re the main characters of a story. What’s the problem with that? It’s not something we can prevent, and I rather think it is quite pleasant to know.”
Twilight sighed, levitating the cake off her plate and biting off at least half of the piece. She spent some time chewing it before she started explaining. “Let me give you an example. Imagine a story, a completely hypothetical story, where Pinkie, here, suddenly kidnaps Rainbow Dash and brutally murders her, with intention to bake her into cupcakes.”
“Hey!” I exclaimed with a full mouth. Seriously, this might make a nice ghost story, but you don’t tell that sort of thing when other ponies are eating! On the other side of the blanket, Pinkie made a hurt face at Twilight, while Fluttershy flattened herself completely against the ground and covered her head with her hooves in fear. Applejack just tilted her hat forward, covering her eyes.
“It’s just for the sake of the example, it’s completely hypothetical,” Twilight waved her hooves at us with the most sheepish face I saw on her since the Smartypants Incident. “You can’t imagine it, right? Pinkie can’t imagine it either, none of us can imagine it. It’s nonsense. Right? I picked this because it’s unimaginable, it’s impossible.”
“Right,” everypony chorused. Even Fluttershy relaxed a bit and returned to ruminating on her cookie.
“But by the definition of that Unlimited Library, it’s a story that will be a real world when somepony writes it, and when doing so, that somepony kills one pony and drives another one insane,” Twilight said, feeding a tiny piece of cake to one of the birds, and nearly starting a fight between them. It took a glare from Fluttershy to stop them, and Twilight had to tear off a few more pieces of cake. “A Pinkie that suddenly decides to murder somepony is nonsense, there’s nothing that can make her do that. It’s not obvious, but sandwiches are also nonsense. If explaining them with authorial intent is enough, it means, that beyond that author, there is no other law to the world, anything can happen. Even something as horrible as what I just described. Anything.”
Rarity took her hat off and started waving it at herself in a cloud of magic, which resulted in a pleasant breeze. “That does sound like a problem…” she said. “So you want to prove that we aren’t actually characters in a story. Just ponies about whom the story is written.”
“Not quite,” Twilight shook her head. “I don’t agree with this theory, but I can’t prove or disprove it, and I don’t need to. If we can find the real reason for the sandwiches to exist, the story theory becomes just another possible explanation of how the universe works. Whatever explains the sandwiches will probably explain a lot of other things, too.”
Pinkie giggled. “I know the real reason!”
“Really?” Twilight stared at her. “Don’t tell me, Pinkie Sense?” she added with a slightly sarcastic grin.
“No, just a story,” Pinkie bounced up. “You see, it was a dark and stormy night…”
✶ ✶ ✶
Once upon a time, it was a dark and stormy night.
And then, it was a fresh, sunny, and slightly wet morning, and Chancellor Puddinghead was having breakfast in her chambers. It so happened, that her chambers at the time were a guest room in the Castle of the Royal Pony Sisters, which was the reason the chancellor was alone in the first place – the Princesses of Equestria treated breakfast as a private meal, and everypony only assembled in the Great Hall by brunch, and not a minute earlier.
It also so happened, that the guest room was at the top of one of the tallest towers. Taken together, all these things were a sure recipe to keep Puddinghead bored out of her considerable wits. So it was no surprise whatsoever, that when Puddinghead popped her head out of the window and dropped her jam toast down, Smart Cookie, whose room was just below, was witness to the unfortunate food item flying past her window.
“Good morning, your chancellorship,” Smart Cookie sighed.
“Good morning! And fetch me that jam toast, will you?” Puddinghead replied.
“That strikes me as highly impractical, your chancellorness,” Smart Cookie commented, peeking outside cautiously. “You dropped it right into the sand pit,” she added, because that was precisely what happened. What exactly was a sand pit doing in the castle courtyard was anypony’s guess, but mercifully, there were no foals playing in it when the toast splashed down. Or any foals in the castle at all, at least, not yet, which is why a sand pit was so out of place.
“Shut up and get to it!” Puddinghead snapped at her. “I’m about to have an idea! Don’t impede the progress, Cookie!”
“Right away, your chancellency…” Smart Cookie grumbled, and started the long trek out of her room and down the stairs.
Things went quiet for a while, which was more than enough time for Puddinghead to spread jam on another toast. And then spread it on a bedpost, a table, the door hinges, and her own hat.
“It’s completely inedible, chancellor!” came a yell from the outside, when Smart Cookie finally navigated the maze of the castle corridors and arrived to the sand pit. “It’s all covered in sand, as could be expected.”
“Of course!” Puddinghead yelled back. “But which side is up? I can’t see from here!”
“Completely inedible, your chancellitude!” Smart Cookie insisted, waving the unfortunate piece of toast so that Puddinghead would see it better. “Sand stuck to the jam. It fell jam first, I reckon.”
“Darn it, Cookie, you spoiled my experiment, now I don’t know which side was up!” Puddinghead yelled. “We’ll have to repeat that! Watch closely, and report everything you see!” she added, as she released the second toast.
Smart Cookie could not obey that order, as circumstances forced her to tightly squeeze her eyes shut. In fact, the circumstances landed right between these eyes of hers, and remained there, held to her coat by the gooseberry jam. “Right, that’s it,” she hissed, and darted back into the tower.
By the time she reached Puddinghead’s room, the latter had spread jam on a third toast, her own clothes, the teapot, and a few more pieces of furniture. “What are you doing back here?” she complained, as Smart Cookie barged in, nearly knocking the door of its hinges. “We didn’t finish the experiments!”
“We sure did, you chancellence,” Smart Cookie said, gritting her teeth. “Toast always falls jam side down.”
“But how am I to have safe, hygienic breakfast then?” Puddinghead complained.
Instead of answering, Smart Cookie peeled the toast off her own face and slapped it right onto the freshly prepared one that Puddinghead still held in her hooves.
She was about to add a large number of unkind words, but something stopped her. That something was a curious glance of green eyes, peeking at her straight out of a wall. Smart Cookie froze with her mouth open, not sure of what to say anymore.
Noticing she’s been discovered, the owner of the eyes stepped into the room, phasing in like a ghost. If ghosts were dressed in black, walked on two legs, and had blazing, floaty, fire ruby red manes, like some cruel parody of an alicorn princess. “What the actual hell is going on?” the owner of the eyes inquired with very obvious annoyance in her voice.
“Uh… breakfast?” Puddinghead replied, offering the newcomer the two pieces of toast glued together by gooseberry jam, accompanied by a bright smile. “Want some? It’s my new invention, I’m going to call it the sandwich!”
“There’s no sand in it,” the newcomer pointed out, and instead of reaching for the food, looked around, conspicuously ignoring both Puddinghead and Smart Cookie. Suddenly, as if noticing something not visible to mortal eyes, she let out an angry, guttural growl…
✶ ✶ ✶
I interrupted her. “Pinkie, what is Rika doing in your story?” Because that’s definitely her. I’m not sure if she can walk through walls, but some of Mary’s superhero friends could, so who knows. That’d be kind of cool.
“I’ve been wondering about that myself,” Pinkie said, scratching her head. “She totally wrecked the punchline…”
“I don’t think I heard the word before, but it sounded very rude… Why?” Rarity wondered. “So far, both of them have been unfailingly polite.”
“I dunno, ask her?” Pinkie replied pointing behind Rarity’s back.
Something very unusual was going on behind Rarity’s back, and I actually dropped the remains of my sandwich back onto the plate and jumped to my hooves, flaring my wings out and preparing to react to this… whatever that was. It started as some sort of dust devil, a mini-tornado sucking in air, dirt, cookie crumbs, grass, and breaking them into particles, which very quickly took on sharp black and red colors and assembled together.
It didn’t even take five seconds for Rika to emerge completely, her dark and spooky form towering over us. “Pinkie…” Rika rasped out, making a step towards Pinkie with an angry grimace on her face. The ground didn’t shake, but it certainly felt like the ground would regret it later.
“Hi Rika!” Pinkie grinned, and bounced up, a plate in her hoof. “Want some cake? You look like you need some cake!”
“No, thank you,” Rika replied, ignoring the cake and grabbing Pinkie by the ear. “Why did you disable page protection, you idiot?!” she hissed, pulling the ear up. “Do you want to start an endless recursion?!” Pinkie followed the ear, flapping in the air like a bedsheet and giggling. It looked very surreal, even if it wasn’t particularly unusual.
“It was a good story! And I know I’m not Puddinhead, I just play her on TV, relax!” Pinkie insisted. “Are you really sure you don’t want cake?” Somehow, she kept the plate upright even though she was swaying left and right beneath the ear, still pinched in Rika’s hand.
Rika sighed deeply. Human faces still look weird, but I think I know this one, it’s the face you get when you’re counting to twenty in your head so you don’t snap at somepony. Once Rika was done, she opened her hand, and Pinkie floated to the ground like an autumn leaf. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Rika mumbled, as she turned around and vanished, blinding me for a split second.
“Pinkie,” Twilight said suddenly, and out of a corner of my eye, I saw hairs slowly peeling out of her neatly combed mane. “If I ask you what this was about, am I going to get a straight answer?”
“But the answer is all twisty like spaghetti, and she mistook cotton candy for spaghetti and they’re not the same, cotton candy isn’t supposed to make sense and she shouldn’t eat it with a fork and if you do the fork gets all sticky and then spaghetti sticks to it and I really just wanted everypony to smile,” Pinkie blurted out at Twilight in a single breath and pushed the plate with cake in her direction. “It’s a nice day out, we’re all here together, we have cake… Shouldn’t we be happy?”
Pinkie is definitely secretly an egghead…
Twilight scowled at Pinkie, but was met with the best puppy dog eyes Pinkie could pull, so instead of saying anything, she just levitated the slice of cake off the plate and swallowed it whole.
“Twilight!” came a yell from the distance, and looking in that direction, I saw Spike, running towards us as fast as his little legs could take him. Mary was following him at a steady walk, falling further and further behind.
I just hope they’re bringing something more fun than another egghead puzzle.
Conversation 19: Rainbow Dash
Rainbow Dash barely participates in the conversation. Meanwhile, Pinkie Pie possibly did some kind of terrible space-time kerfuffle in an attempt to make ponies smile.
7237991
Rainbow Dash is kinda required here for her perspective. Everypony else heard Pinkie's story somewhat differently. :)
That actually made kind of sense and I think I followed Pinkie's logic. I think that means I need more sleep
And now we have to wait and see if the tree branched out or if this is what currently more or less happened locally.
Now that I think about it, if it wasn't an exact recounting of the events the tree branched out anyway. At least if it doesn't have some tolerance for the storification of "real" events.
So... Pinkie being the pony she is with her strange powers wrote history by creating that story which Rika intruded on to find out what was happening. I guess it is a bad idea to write a story from within the story and that causes 'endless recursion' which Rika doesn't want to happen because of an unknown effect?
7239379
Rika wouldn't care about history, but when you're telling a story about yourself, it's possible to start a recursion loop if you can no longer tell where your reality gives way to a subsidiary story. In certain circumstances, this can be very dangerous for everyone involved. :)
Wow, so Pinkie basically retconned reality? I bet now historical records will show Pinkie's story as truth, and almost everyone will remember that story as "the way it always has been."
I bet for the Canterlot Wedding, Trixie will play a prominent role, since she is the protagonist of this particular story.
7242143
What historical records? The ones Discord flooded with custard?
7242261 Whatever ink patterns could be hypothetically discerned in those custard-smeared pages. They have always included the story of Chancellor Puddinghead and the sand pit.... they just didn't used to have always included the story.
7242291
I'm afraid it's going to be more complex than that. :)
7248366
*Checks google*
This? No. i didn't realize there was such a thing until your comment.
Within the context of this story, Celestia having sent Twilight to her old home where she found a private room with a journal claiming to be their journal...their confusion does not make sense.
7248379
The book is literally billed as "as seen in the show". This is a particular Equestria where this statement is fact. :)
Check it out and you'll find every concern they listed well-founded.
7248379
Here, I wrote a compendium of the thing so you don't have to find and read the actual book. :)
7239540 Have you read Hard Reset? Very good "dimension hopping" story. Reads like a time travel fic, but you can't really reset time, just your localized area in comparison to it and space.
Basically the biggest pile of instant retcons ever made.
7251983
There are several stories by that name, if my memory serves me right. :) I've read more than one at least, why?
7251986 Talk of recursiveness brought to mind loops and such, which gave way to the thought that time can't be looped without paradox (if you go back in time, you do not replace your past self, but rather make two of you appear at one time), which led me on to a few other trains of thought, which brought me to Hard Reset by Eakin. And all that made me wonder if you'd read that at all, and so I asked the question.
Aporia is possibly my favorite metafiction story to date. I'd started a story (Titled as Prologue: A New Life), about a girl who knows she's a main character, and who has been avoiding every story hook she had put in front of her. Talking animal telling her she's a princess our otherwise some version of Magical Girl? Ignore it, or put it up for adoption. Old person offering some sort of power in return for something as trivial as helping them cross the street? Decline it, or throw away any items received, and always buy pens in bulk. Leave giant monsters to the military or police. Etc
I feel that Mary is a much, MUCH more refined and detailed version of that character I'd thought up one night at random, and that Rika easily moves from defying tropes, to using them entirely too her advantage. Every time Mary notes something, it's something I had taken note of, but had dropped as a joke or unimportant detail rather than pursued as you have. You've made a character I have a bit of trouble pinning down, and I love that. It makes it a lot more fun to guess where things will go, and I'm MUCH less likely to guess correctly, too.
I once made a comment in jest on a story that was so spot on with what the author was planning, I'd spoiled who the bad guy was gonna be, said almost word for word what Pinkie was gonna rant about upon the reveal, and had said exactly how he'd planned for the big bad to get thwarted. He ended up cancelling the fic because, even after I edited my comment to be much more benign rather than analytical, he'd lost all drive to actually write the thing. I doubt I could ever do that with this story, and it makes the anticipation for each chapter that much sweeter.
7256086
What do you mean can't? After all, what it really is, is nothing but a chained transfer of memories backwards in time. It's even easier to do without paradox than full-body time travel. In fact, if Twilight's "It's About Time" spell can be cast on inanimate objects, she can set it up herself without the intervention of Eakin's mysterious source of looping -- though obviously, death would not cause the loop to recur, you have to be alive to do it.
Thank ye kindly for the compliment, though I'm afraid the next chapter is going to be late. :( I know exactly what's going on and what they're all saying to each other and when I write it down it comes out as stale and uninspiring.
7256503 No worries about it being late, and Merlin's Tears, sending your memories back in time is something I've only seen don't in a Harry Potter fanfic, but most fanfics dealing with time travel where you end up in past isn't an actual loop.
Eakin's could be a technical loop, sending the memories the past at a specific moment in time, but I'm not sure it was explained that way.
It's like that new anime that's come out, Re: Starting over from Zero in another world. The main character is reset to a new save state ever told he dies, the first one being in front of a fruit vendor, and the second in bed at a mansion he's been invited to. He remembers everything including his deaths, so it's feasible that he's going back within the same timeline through memory displacement or something, but it's more likely he's just being put into an entirely new parallel world each time he resets.
7258501
Look up Steins;Gate. They weren't the first to do it either, is not a new idea by far, and Steins;Gate actually plays it straight with a pseudo-engineering explanation, it covers about half of the time travel used in that story and grows out of a much simpler technology that permits them to send an SMS back in time.
Most groundhog day scenarios can be interpreted as sending memories back in time until they start carrying items around, which I haven't observed in the wild until I saw that done in certain ponyfics.
7239540 Ugh, that show went completely over my head. What little I could understand from the TVTropes page made me not want to touch the visual novels at all.
7290118
Well, you're missing on a significant chunk of literature that has certain stories that cannot be told in any other way... If that one went over your head, try Ever17, it's very much worth it. :)
weren't, if Twilight were to speak properly and use the subjunctive mood for counterfactuals…
Thanks, AJ. ["Ah reckon"?]
Uhh...last I checked, just imagining it with a decent minimum of detail immediately makes it more of a hyperthesis.
8649858
…what, really?
7256503
I hope not, because that means there's twenty or so universes out there where the villains win.
First, if you want to know more about Pinkie's "turn ponies into desert", well, it's the great library, so ... dang, sorry. I spent 2 hours trying to find this story on Fimfiction. All I can say is I read it, so I know it's there, but I didn't save it in my "read stories" list.
Second: what? What just happened? How was Pinkie telling a strange "Maybe this happened?" story a way for Rika to show up in Pinkie's story? And what was Rika talking to Pinkie about after that?
And ... "Page Protection"? Any answer I might have to that has Pinkie not a character in this story but another insert character which makes no sense given her history of being in ponyville for years ...