"Now then, today I would like to discuss memories you may feel hesitant to relive," Luna said to Fluttershy, who was seated on a couch across from her, nodded timidly. "Memories of pain, of loss, of desperation. I wish for you delve within the darkness of your own mind, but only as far as you are willing to go. If you don't believe you can handle remembering something in detail, say so, and I will change the subject. Do you understand?" she asked.
Fluttershy nodded again. "I..." she hesitated, as Luna had completely expected her to do. Luna waited patiently. "I suppose... the darkest moment in my life..." Luna noticed Fluttershy's eyes glass over slightly, becoming unfocused. "Would be the day Thanos erased half the life in the universe... with the snap of his fingers."
Luna blinked. She blinked again. Such an admittance deserved two blinks, she told herself. "I'm... what?" she asked, unsure if she heard Fluttershy correctly. Half of the entire population of life in a universe? At the snap of a finger?
Fluttershy shifted uncomfortably, delving deeper into her own memories. "His goal was to thin out life in the universe, make it so there were less people consuming finite resources. In a demented way, he was right. Life growing unchecked will consume the universe it occupies. It was why Captain Marvel did her best to institute population control measures across the known universe, to prevent another Thanos from rising. But to get back to that moment...
"He had acquired the Infinity Stones..." she whispered. Fluttershy completely missed Luna's face becoming incredibly alarmed the moment she mentioned the stones. "Thor... Thor tried to stop him. We all did. We threw everything we had at him. Thor had buried his axe in Thanos' chest and was just about to finish him off. Unfortunately, none of us had our eyes on his hand. We had relaxed. We had won."
Fluttershy gulped. "Then he just... snapped his fingers." She clicked her tongue. "All with a smile." She spread her hooves. "There was a flash of light. After that Thanos was left kneeling there, Stormbreaker in his chest. The glove with the stones in it was melted to his arm, smoking, and ruined. I remember how he looked. He was... sad. Then he vanished in a portal."
Fluttershy looked into Luna's eyes. "That was when people everywhere began dissolving into ash, to just blow away in the wind." Her eyes gained a haunted look. "Bucky... T'challa... Sam... Even Fury. Across the universe life vanished into ashes, leaving behind a broken and heavily mourning second half."
"And... And after that?" Luna asked, her mind still reeling from Fluttershy mentioning the Infinity Stones. It was a subject none should know about... at least none in their universe.
"Twenty three days later we were able to track Thanos down again, but..." Fluttershy sighed. "He had used the stones again, this time to destroy them and prevent anyone from undoing his work. It had, by his own admission, nearly killed him." Her eyes suddenly grew hard. "Thor finished that job when it became clear that Thanos had attained the final victory." Then she slumped in on herself. "After that... after that was five years of grief and mourning as planets the universe over tried to adapt and move on." Fluttershy shuddered. "I lost a lot of friends that day."
Luna shook her head. "A loss, to be sure," she said sadly. "Did your world ever recover from the trauma?" she asked.
Fluttershy nodded, beginning to smile. "Yes... Like I said, five years had gone by. The world had changed, but not too much. Good and evil both had suffered from The Snap. When the shock had worn off however, it pretty much went back to business as usual." She grinned. "Bruce had even managed to gain control of his Hulk powers, becoming a beloved hero in New York in the process."
"Five years..." Fluttershy shook her head. "It took five years for Ant-Man to return from the Quantum Realm. A trip, in his own words, that took only five hours from his perspective." Seeing Luna's slight confusion, Fluttershy elaborated. "Ant-Man was a superhero who could shrink and enlarge himself. He had discovered a molecular universe by shrinking himself down far enough, and also discovered that time behaved differently there."
Luna gaped. "No... You did not..." she asked, shocked.
Fluttershy nodded with a grin. "With Tony's help, we created a device that could safely send people back in time." She raised a hoof, as if to stop Luna. "Don't get me wrong, we didn't intend to change the past. Tony and Bruce both made it incredibly clear that Time Travel cannot be used to change the past. But the future... the future we could change."
Luna frowned. "Alright. I am curious. How did you "win" if you did not change the past?"
"By acquiring the Infinity Stones from different time periods. With all six stones, the plan was to do the same thing Thanos did. We would snap our fingers. Then, everyone who had been killed by The Snap five years ago, would be back. After that the plan was to take the stones back to their respective times, making it so that the past was not in fact changed. We simply borrowed things from the past, and returned them."
Luna blinked. Truly, it was an unorthodox plan. Most who had access to time travel tried to change the past, not seeing the inherent flaw in that plan, but the Avengers... it seemed they were smarter than anyone had given them credit for. "It worked?"
Fluttershy frowned. "It did... but no plan survives contact with the enemy. The Thanos of the past caught wind of what was going on and somehow hitched a ride back to the present alongside us." She sighed. "Bruce had done the honors. His powers made him the most likely to survive using the stones, and even then it had destroyed his ability to use his right arm. With his sacrifice, everyone Thanos had killed was back... and then Thanos attacked, leveling our home with an orbital bombardment."
"The battle that followed was... brutal. Every superhero. Every police officer. Every civilian with a cause. The universe was against Thanos, and Thanos took us on with a smile." Fluttershy's eyes grew watery again. "He actually had managed to acquire the stones again, and we thought that was it. He said that he now understood the flaw in his original plan, and this time intended to destroy the entire universe, then rebuild it from scratch. Then Tony flew in and engaged him briefly, only to get knocked back. "I am inevitable," Thanos had said, just before snapping his fingers... to nothing."
"What?" Luna asked. She felt almost like a child hearing a war story from their grandparents. Say what you will about Fluttershy. She knew how to tell a story.
"That was when Thanos realized that while he may have the gauntlet... the stones were not in it." Fluttershy sighed. "Then he looked at Tony in horrifying realization, and found him holding up his hand, the stones affixing themselves to it. Tony said... Tony's last words..." Here Fluttershy choked up a little. ""And I am Iron Man." Then he snapped his fingers."
"Thanos, his army, his ships, and all of his weapons... vanished. Thanos even smiled in respect at Tony just before he vanished. But Tony..."
Luna shook her head sadly. The Infinity Stones exacted a heavy toll on any who sought to use them as one. On a mere human whose strength was his genius? The Stones probably killed him, and not gently.
"Tony sacrificed his life, leaving behind his wife and daughter, to end the tyranny of Thanos once and for all," Fluttershy declared. "I was later sent to the different timelines to replace that which we had taken from them, and had decided to take a page from Tony's book. I stayed behind, and lived out my life like I had originally wanted to. I returned to the present the long way, and, as a feeble old man, I passed the mantle of Captain America onto a friend." Fluttershy smiled. "I died a few years later, basking in the glow of a peaceful universe, and content with life."
It took them a month to track him down. Tony gives the timeline while he was adrift.
Besides the thing above he would have know that Scott Lang was the second Ant-Man. Hank was the original and the creator of the stuff used.
Excellent work on this latest chapter. Fluttershy/Cap's recall of those events was great (as was Luna's reaction to the way things went). Appropriately bittersweet account, but at least Cap proved that the "you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain" doesn't always HAVE TO be the case (he lived to old age and retirement, but DID NOT become the villain and, in fact, actually had a peaceful death). Then again, this is Captain America NOT Batman.
Anyway, very good job on the exchange and characterizations, as usual.
9682631
Well, she/he is not the Soul of Justice for nothing.
9682736
Point VERY well taken.
9682621
Huh. I could have sworn it was a few days. I'll have to go rewatch the movie. Most of what I wrote here was what I could remember off the top of my head.
Good story, and I hope you get back to doing regular updates again soon, but there's something in the comment discussions that's been bugging me. As I recall, you've stated in comments that:
I understand why you've made these decisions, but I think it's overkill and doesn't make much sense.
1. Vulnerability to magic.
Superman is only "weak" to magic by comparison to everything else, it does not actually have amplified effect against him. Magic used on Superman is exactly as effective as magic used on an ordinary person, no more and no less. His powers simply don't interact with it in either direction, neither increasing nor decreasing his resistance to it. I don't think changing this is necessary to allow things to challenge Twilight, simply because magic is extremely more common in this setting than in Superman's home universe.
2. Stopping the sword.
This being a mistake doesn't make much sense to me, and also seems to me to be taking the idea of magic vulnerability farther than is necessary. It would make much more sense to me if the vulnerability (or rather, lack of increased resistance) depends on the mechanics of what the magic is attempting to do and how. If someone magically creates a 10 ton boulder and drops it on Twilight, that should have the same effect as dropping any other 10 ton boulder on her - i.e. nearly nothing because, while she's not especially resistant to magic, she is extremely resistant to being crushed by boulders.
In short, I think it should depend on how direct the magical attack is. If someone attacks Twilight directly with magic, that should work just like attacking anyone else. If someone uses magic to create or manipulate something in Twilight's environment to attack her, that should have to overcome her powers just like any non-magical attack. Try to cut her in half with magic? Works fine. Try to cut her in half with a physical sword that you're wielding with telekinesis magic? The sword bounces off. Try to cut her in half with a sword you created with magic? Despite its origins it's still a physical sword and bounces off.
Twilight stopping Nightmare Moon's sword is consistent with this logic, and so wouldn't be a mistake. I think this is also sufficient to still allow frequent challenges for Twilight, again because magic is so very ubiquitous in Equestria. In fact, magic is so ubiquitous that I think there would actually be too many challenges without a limitation on it like this one.
3. Shielding against magic.
This one especially makes no sense to me. I get why you came up with the idea, Twilight's an incredibly powerful magical prodigy and her flying around with both Superman's powers and an anti-magic shield would be exactly the unstoppable god mode you're trying to prevent, but I can't think of any reasonable in-setting explanation for why it would work that way. Magical shields against magical attacks canonically exist, Twilight's been shown casting them herself on several occasions, and Superman's powers interfering with them specifically while leaving the rest of Twilight's magic untouched has no reasonable basis I can think of.
So, I'm thinking take a step back and use a more general idea that accomplishes the same goal. You want to prevent the simultaneous use of Superman's durability and Twilight's magic shielding. A more general version of that would be to prevent the simultaneous use of Superman's powers and Twilight's magic. You've already written scenes that preclude this being an absolute restriction, but I don't recall her ever using powerful magic while using Superman's powers. The solution, then, is to make it a sliding scale - the more magic Twilight's using the less she can use Superman's powers at the same time, and vice versa.
As for why it would work this way, that's simple and as a bonus also gives a reason for why Twilight's magic is so powerful: Twilight's magic and Superman's powers draw from the same power source. The more power she's using on one, the less is available for the other.
End result, Twilight can maintain an incredibly powerful magical shield, or she can be nearly invincible against all things non-magical, but not both at the same time. If she carefully balances her efforts, she could also maintain a moderately strong shield while being moderately tough, but while this would close the gap in her defenses it would also greatly reduce the amount of power needed to simply overwhelm whichever defense you're attacking. Additionally, the tradeoff also affects all of her other magic and other powers - levitating many heavy things at once reduces her toughness just like maintaining a magical shield does, and both uses of magic also reduce her physical strength, speed, and all of Superman's other powers, potentially even disabling those powers entirely if she's exerting her magic to its limits. This is something completely absent from your idea as far as I know, and reduces her overall power a bit to compensate for the increased versatility.
9683128
Well I know that by the end of summer it will be out on Blu-Ray so any edits can wait until then.
9683424
I set it up so that everyone has innate magic, and said magic will provide a sort of passive defense against other magic. Not a really noticeable one, but enough to account for how magic sometimes works to different degrees of strength against different ponies. Sort of like a magic immune system.
With Twilight, her Kryptonian biology negates that. She's not weak to it, she just has no natural "passive" defense either, making it "seem" like magic has an amplified affect on her, when in truth she is just getting hit with the one hundred percent strength of each and every spell.
A cutting spell would cut her like a hot knife through butter where it would only scratch a normal pony. Inversely, a healing spell will heal her in the absolutely most efficient way it can, as it's not actually fighting her innate magic at the same time.
She can shield against magic, but she has to put a fair amount of will behind said shield for it to be effective. I plan to eventually reveal this later on when one of her friends realizes what she did with the sword was not supposed to actually work. Twilight had made a small barrier of magic between her hoof and the sword back when she first fought Nightmare Moon.
9683424
But thank you for your opinion. I appreciate the constructive criticism and encourage you to find more plot-holes and let me know. You never know, you just might find something I seriously screwed up.