Quantum Starlight

by Rambling Writer

6 - Back Again

Something about the corridor of the time machine didn’t feel right. It made Starlight’s skin crawl and every step she took was like she was forcing herself to walk through mud. Everything was silent, even the footsteps of herself and the Doctor, except for a few distorted voices muttering things Starlight couldn’t make out and wasn’t sure she wanted to. Flickering, indistinct, three-dimensional silhouettes, almost like ghosts, ran or walked up and down the corridor, passing through her like she was nothing. She didn’t feel anything.

After a while, Starlight was convinced that she’d gone more than a full circle around. She couldn’t say why, but she was positive the corridor was longer than it should have been. She knew for a fact that it hadn’t been a minute, but it felt like she’d been walking the path for hours, around and around in circles, chasing her own tail.

Then, finally, the second doorway came into view. Starlight sprinted the last few yards and-

---

Everfree Forest, October 9
9:42 AM — 10 hours until the Fracture in Time

-stumbled out of the time machine and collapsed onto the ground. The sweet, sweet ground, with its struggling plants and its dirt and wow it was bright out. Starlight immediately clamped her eyes shut. They screamed and burned and-

It was bright out. It was the middle of the night when they’d left. Starlight opened one of her eyes just enough to look through a hole in the ceiling. Sunlight pierced through, shafting down to the ground.

They’d done it.

The Doctor was whooping it up, prancing about like a colt. “Ha ha! Success! Justification! I’d had it all along! It works! It works it works it works! Yes!” He pumped a hoof into the air. When he dropped to the ground, he was grinning broadly. “This,” he whispered excitedly, “might just be the finest moment of my life. A life filled with fine moments.” He laughed again.

“Even if it isn’t,” said Starlight, grinning a little herself, “it’s way up there.” She squinted up at the hole in the ceiling. It seemed awfully bright. “Uh, Doc, where- when are we?”

“Almost fourteen hours back,” said the Doctor, still jumping about like a ninny. He settled down for a moment. “We need some sleep. You and I both have been up for a while, now, and we don’t want to fall asleep while saving the world, do we?” He laughed.

“I guess not,” said Starlight. “You don’t happen to have beds here, do you?”

The Doctor snorted. “You wound me. Of course there’d be nights where I’d be on a roll and want to be here next morning. I do have a bed. Several, point of fact! In case I ever invited other scientists over.” He frowned and tapped his chin. “Never actually did, though…”

“Considering this place was just built to make a time machine, you sure planned for an awful lot.”

“A good scientist always does. Now come on. The beds ought to still be clean.”

---

Everfree Forest, October 9
10:04 AM — 10 hours until the Fracture in Time

Starlight couldn’t sleep. She’d set a time-delayed alarm spell, she’d blocked the light from the room, she had a comfortable-ish and clean-ish bed, she was tired, but she couldn’t sleep.

Everything was just moving too fast. The first time machine incident had just been, what, three hours ago? (Along her personal timeline.) It felt like much longer than that. The idea of time breaking down still scared her, especially now that she’d seen its effects firsthoof. And if Sunburst was right, it was only going to get worse and worse.

She and the Doctor were back here to fix that, but could they? She’d been so certain before, but now, with nothing to do but sit and wait and think, she wasn’t so sure. Sunburst had said they couldn’t, and he knew what he was talking about. Serene had said they couldn’t, and she had ponies working for her who knew what they were talking about. And yet she’d seen her own changes, so… She wasn’t sure. No matter which way she tried to take her arguments, she couldn’t find a definite answer.

And if they were going to succeed… Sunburst. Starlight didn’t care how much he brushed it off, that version of Sunburst was going to be gone. Simply vanishing into the ether of time wasn’t something you should be able to just brush off. Would he even notice? Or would he simply be gone? Would his memories start vanishing first? Starlight shuddered; the thought of your memories slowly vanishing, of having your identity stripped away because you didn’t exist anymore, was almost enough for her to wish she’d fail. Almost.

And Serene. The new Serene, the one she’d seen right before going into the time machine. What was up with her? Why was she being so enigmatic? Where’d she gone to? How had she gotten back? Had she even gone anywhere? She’d gone through the time machine after it’d malfunctioned, so… maybe not. But Starlight was sure she had; she’d changed too much over the space of a few hours for nothing to have happened. The machine had been set for… Starlight wasn’t sure of the exact number, but it was something small, like five minutes. No way it had only been five minutes. Just what had happened?

The worst thing was her complete inability to do anything. All she could do was sit and wait until it was time for her to get up and leave. Starlight liked doing things; sitting and waiting wasn’t something she was good at. But it was all she could do. She rolled over and tried counting sheep, but time began stuttering whenever they’d clear the fence, and she’d go back to the whole mess.

Starlight dozed off eventually, but it came in fits and starts.

---

Train to Streamhaven, October 9
5:36 PM — 3 hours until the Fracture in Time

Starlight stared out the window as the train approached Streamhaven. She hadn’t taken her eyes from the window ever since they’d left Ponyville over an hour earlier. Her mind was still running around in circles.

Hypothetically, she could’ve contact her and the Doctor’s past selves and gotten them to help. But that just seemed… weird to her. Like she shouldn’t do it. She couldn’t say why, no matter how much she thought of it. The Doctor hadn’t suggested it, either, but did he have a reason, or was he just following her lead? It was hard to tell.

So, after a halfway-decent day’s rest, the two of them had sort of snuck from the Everfree to the train station, avoiding detection if at all possible. Which was a bit difficult when Pinkie Pie bounced up from out of nowhere and asked what they were doing, hiding in those bushes, but the Doctor managed to shoo her away with some talk of a party on the other side of town. Still, at least they’d made it to the station relatively unobserved by anypony who might see them leave and later see them still in Ponyville.

Once they’d boarded the train, each one of them went to their own devices. The Doctor stole a few (dozen) napkins from the dining car and started scribbling equations down on them. Starlight looked out the window. She’d slept, but it’d done absolutely nothing to help her get her feelings in order. Hopefully, a quiet train ride would do exactly that.

But now, an hour and a half later, she still wasn’t sure what she was feeling. Hopeful, anxious, definitely. But there was something more than that, som-

“Starlight?”

The Doctor’s voice made Starlight almost jump out of her seat, after the two of them had been silent for so long. “Uh, yeah?”

“What’s wrong?” The Doctor’s expression was of vague concern; even that was more than Starlight was expecting.

“Uh, uh, nothing, nothing,” Starlight said quickly. She tried to change the subject. “Look, I’m, I’m sorry for dragging you into this, a-”

“Are you mad?” the Doctor asked, breaking into a huge grin. “I’m going to help save the world and I’ve already gotten confirmation that one of the things I’ve been working on for a good portion of my life actually works perfectly! This is just splendid! Why are you apologizing?”

“Well, there’s the tiny matter of getting chased by soldiers employed by a tech company.”

“Oh, hush,” the Doctor said, waving a hoof dismissively. “There’s got to be some danger.” He grinned again. “Actually, saving the world with no danger would be a bit dull, don’t you think? I’ve always wanted to go on the sorts of adventures Twilight and her friends have, putting their lives on the line…” He sighed. “But I’ve never found the time, and I’m not sure I’d be able to drag myself away from my work, anyway.”

The only thing Starlight could say was, “Hmm.” She turned back to the window. At least someone was feeling upbeat about this. As the train began slowing into the station, she wondered how he’d feel when he actually had crossbows pointed at his f-

“Seriously, Starlight,” the Doctor said, his voice more serious, “what’s wrong?”

“Well, I’m…” Starlight sighed. No use in hiding it now. “What if we’re wrong? What if we can’t stop it all?” She tore her gaze away from the window. “I want to be able to fix this now, not throw some answer together later. It’s easier that way. But… but what if we can’t?”

The Doctor paused, chewing his lip. Eventually, he said, “Can’t say anything about that, I’m afraid. Really, we don’t know enough about time travel yet to go one way or another, most unfortunately. And as delightful as blazing new territory is, I agree, I’d rather not do it with Equestria on the line. But even if it doesn’t work, well, we tried, didn’t we?” He shrugged. “Honestly, trying and failing is better than not trying at all.”

Starlight sighed and hung her head. “I hope you’re right,” she said.

The whistle blew, the train came to a complete halt, and the Doctor said, “Plus, this is hardly the only option available, isn’t it? This is just the first one we’ve tried.”

Starlight’s spirits went up a notch. Well, more like a quarter of a notch. But they still went up. “True.”

The two ponies left the station and headed over to Streamhaven University with barely any resistance. But of course they wouldn’t encounter any; nothing had happened yet. They were just two ponies, a bit unfamiliar to the ponies of Streamhaven, with nothing unusual about them, and definitely not time travelers, because that would be absurd, right? Starlight remembered the route she and Sunburst had taken out and quickly brought the Doctor to the failsafe room’s door. The whole while, the only other ponies they encountered were a receptionist, who barely looked up at them, and a janitor, who nodded at them but assumed they were meant to be there and kept whistling and mopping.

It was strange, approaching the failsafe room from this angle. The door looked sturdy, definitely too strong for her to knock down, and a keypad pulsed on the wall next to it. When the Doctor looked expectantly at her, Starlight rolled her shoulders. “Okay,” she muttered to herself, “I think I got this. Zero… one one… two… two.”

Beebeep! With a click, the door opened an inch. Starlight sighed in relief, almost wilting. At least something was definitely going right; she was afraid Sunburst’s code had been revoked already.

The Doctor zipped in before Starlight . “Great whickering stallions,” he murmured, “this is quite the setup. Wish I had this sort of budget. Ah, well. You can’t always get what you want.” He squinted at one of the crystals. “Wonder what, specifically, they do.” He raised a hoof towards the glass.

“Don’t touch it!” screamed Starlight.

The Doctor yelped, jumped several feet in the air, and fell to the ground in a tumble. As he rubbed his mane, he glared up at Starlight. “An explanation would be nice,” he muttered.

“Those keep the time machine stable,” Starlight hissed. “Those breaking is what caused the problem in the first place.”

The Doctor blinked. “Ah. So sorry.” In spite of how short his apology was, it at least sounded sincere. He pushed himself away from the racks and slowly got to his hooves.

“No, it’s, I’m sorry,” Starlight replied. She rubbed the back of her neck and looked away, ears back. “I just, I don’t want to come back and end up being the cause of it all, so… freakout. Sorry.”

“Apology accepted,” the Doctor said. “But we’re here, so… wait?”

“Yeah. Now we’ve just got to wait, what, two and a half hours?” Starlight smiled unconvincingly. “It can’t be that bad, right?”

---

Streamhaven University, October 9
8:10 PM — 7 minutes until the Fracture in Time

Waiting sucked all sorts of ridiculously obscene unmentionables. Starlight had paced back and forth so much she was certain she was wearing a rut into the metal floor.

“What time is it now?” she asked the Doctor for the umpteen bazillionth time.

“8:11,” the Doctor answered promptly. How he managed to keep track of time so accurately without a watch, Starlight was sure she’d never know.

She groaned. Six minutes to go, if she was remembering it correctly. It felt like it’d be an eternity. “This sounds terrible, but I wish the time apocalypse would just hurry up and get here already.”

“‘Time apocalypse’ is a bit wordy,” muttered the Doctor. “Perhaps we should come up with something else.”

“Time itself is about to break, you’re worried about what we call it?”

The Doctor shrugged. “It isn’t like I can do much else, is it? And if we’re going to survive and talk about this later, we’ll to refer to it as something besides, ‘that one time we broke time’.

Starlight rolled her eyes. “I don’t see why we ha-”

“And ‘time apocalypse’ doesn’t sound quite as… punchy as, say, ‘zombie apocalypse’. But we-” The Doctor’s ears went straight up, and he grinned broadly. “Time crash! That sounds brilliant! It’s clean, it’s concise, and it quickly gets across what went wrong. In a sense. It’s not perfect, I’ll grant you that, but it’s much better than ‘time apocalypse’.”

“Okay, it is, but I don’t see what the big deal is in-”

“You think this is going to work, don’t you?”

Starlight blinked. “Well, yeah, bu-”

“Then,” the Doctor said, poking her in the chest, “after we save the world, we shall need some way to refer to this incident. We want to talk about it, don’t we? And ‘time apocalypse’ is all… blegh.” He made a face. “It rolls off the tongue absolutely horribly! ‘Time crash’, on the other hoof…” He smiled to himself and nodded. “Ho ho, now there’s a memorable phrase! It’s perfectly short, and yet it’s surprisingly accurate as to what went wrong, while ‘time apocalypse’ is a bit vague as to the what, and that’s quite important, because-”

As the Doctor kept prattling, Starlight’s mind drifted. You think this is going to work, don’t you? But did she? If she secretly didn’t, that, well, that’d explain a lot. Why she wanted to stay out of sight, why she felt so lost doing this. But why would she think that? She reminded herself for what felt like the thousandth time that she’d seen changes in the timeline happen. Was it because of what Serene had said? Was it because, ultimately, the changes hadn’t stuck? Was it-

Interrupting both her thoughts and the Doctor’s rambles, the door opened. The two ponies beyond, undoubtedly the saboteurs, stopped walking and stared at Starlight and the Doctor. Starlight and the Doctor stared at them.

After a moment of silence, the Doctor coughed. “This is a new one,” he muttered.

“Starry?” asked Serene.

Comments

[Kichi]

Waiting a couple of chapters to read this story... Just a question, did you think about add this story to "Time Travel" group and any Starlight group?

[Thought Prism]

Starlight shuddered; the thought of your memories slowly vanishing, of having your identity stripped away because you didn’t exist anymore, was almost enough for her to wish she’d fail.

[tsaukpaetra]

And this is a younger than the previous but still older than the at-accident-time Serene. Keep up, Starlight, the wobbles get worse!