Quantum Starlight

by Rambling Writer

7 - The Secret History of Time Travel

Streamhaven University, October 9
8:13 PM — 4 minutes until the Fracture in Time

Starlight stared at Serene.

Serene stared at Starlight.

“Serene, what- what’re you doing here?” Starlight asked quietly.

“I’m just making sure the pieces fall into place,” said Serene. “They have to. What’re you doing here?”

“Pieces- fall-” stammered Starlight. “What are you talking about?”

“Tail-chasing,” said Serene. “You haven’t answered my question.”

“You’ve barely answered mine!”

Next to Starlight, the Doctor shifted his hooves and looked back and forth between Serene and the Monarch soldier behind her. He coughed. “Starlight, ah, I believe you should wrap this up soon.”

Starlight groaned and rubbed her forehead. “Alright, look, Serene,” she said. “Somepony’s going to break the time machine and time itself. I’m here to try and stop them. That answer your question?”

Serene shrugged. “Close enough.”

Maybe Starlight was just being paranoid, but something about Serene was really rubbing her the wrong way, even more than in the Everfree. She was even more relaxed than she had been, even though she knew what was coming. She was being evasive. She was being cryptic. She was hiding something.

And there was no way her coming here, now was a coincidence.

“8:14, Starlight,” the Doctor whispered.

“Okay,” Starlight said, “I answered your question. You answer mine, and you better answer it straight, or so help me, I’ll…” She hoped some threat would pop up, but nothing did. She just finished off her sentence with a growl.

Serene wasn’t threatened in the slightest. “I’m doing the things that need doing.”

“Talk straight!” yelled Starlight. Her horn started glowing brightly. “What! Are! You! Doing!”

The Monarch soldier’s own horn started glowing, but Serene waved him down. Instead of becoming intimidated, she just rolled her eyes, sighed, and said, “I’m destroying the time machine.”

Starlight’s magic faltered and her horn went out in shock. “W-what?” she whispered.

“What?” asked the Doctor.

“Destroying,” Serene said slowly. “The. Time. Machine. It broke because it was sabotaged. Somepony had to be the saboteur. I’m that somepony. Doy.”

Starlight blinked. No. This couldn’t be possible. It just- No. Serene wasn’t that stupid. Surely she realized- No. “But- but why?”

“You can’t change the past, Starry,” Serene said, shrugging. “The time machine had to break. I’m making sure it breaks. Everything’s going to happen the way it should.”

Starlight’s mind stopped working and split in two. One side went: No. No. No. No. No. It couldn’t have been Serene. Serene didn’t even know why she was breaking the machine, right? Why was she so certain it had to break? To fix the whole mess, all she had to do was not break it.

The other side was a bit more pragmatic. Starlight lowered her head, pawed at the ground, and ignited her horn. “Well, then,” she said, “I’m making sure it doesn’t break.”

Serene lifted an eyebrow. “Really.”

In the space of an instant, Starlight found herself forced up on her back legs and pinned against one of the racks, feeling like seven layers of crap had just gotten kicked out of her. Serene was pressing a hoof up into her throat and smirking nastily. “I’ve been chronon-active a lot longer than you, Starry,” she whispered. “You don’t know how this works.”

Behind her, Starlight saw the Doctor move, but the Monarch trooper tackled him and wrestled him to the ground. The Doctor put up as best a fight he could, but research hadn’t done anything for his strength, earth pony or not. “Starlight,” he gasped, “you-” The trooper smashed his head into the ground.

Those few words were enough for Starlight, somehow. She teleported out of Serene’s grasp to a space behind her on the other side of the room. And yet, somehow, Serene was on top of her before she could move, slamming her head down into the floor. The room started tilting and stars filled Starlight’s vision.

“Sorry about this,” said Serene, not sounding very convincing, “but it’s necessary.”

Starlight blinked, tried to clear her vision. She started hearing the sounds of smashing glass and shattering crystals. She struggled to her hooves and shook her head. That got her sight settled down enough to see Serene driving her hooves through the glass and crystals of the racks at random.

“Serene!” yelled Starlight, trying to stand up. “Stop it!”

“Can’t!” yelled Serene. “Ouroboros, Starry! Ouroboros!” She smashed another set of glass and crystals, and something sparked. Alarms began sounding.

Starlight’s stomach suddenly turned over. Serene dropped to her knees, coughing and gagging. The Doctor and the trooper didn’t seem to be affected, and kept wrestling on the floor.

Then Starlight’s head was crushed in a vice and everything stopped. Silence reigned. The Doctor and the trooper froze. A few bouncing crystal and glass shards hung in the air.

The fracture.

Starlight shook her head and the worst of the headache began receding. Serene was not only still moving, but already up, grinning with… satisfaction? She looked on the verge of laughter.

“What did you do?!” bellowed Starlight. She lunged, but Serene danced out of range with an unnatural speed. Starlight stumbled and fell to the floor.

“Made sure I didn’t cause a paradox,” Serene said. She planted a hoof on Starlight’s neck and back. “You never had a chance.”

Starlight wriggled. No give. She teleported out from under Serene’s hooves and slung off a blast of magic at Serene. But Serene had already moved behind another rack, and Starlight missed by a mile.

“I was going to make you an offer,” Serene said, sidling back into view. “But if you’re here, plan A is shot. Of course…” A grin crept onto her face, one that made Starlight’s blood run cold. “Now I know where you and Sunny are going to be. See you there.” She saluted, then just… vanished. It wasn’t teleportation, she was just gone.

Starlight ripped her mind from Serene. She was gone, and Starlight had to focus on the now. Okay, she thought. That didn’t work. And now Serene’s going to get Sunburst. That’s why she was at the other time machine. How’d she know to go there? Can’t worry about that now. Gotta-

The Doctor. She had to get him out of here. She looked back down at him and the trooper grappling on the ground. There was no way she could unfreeze just the Doctor… but maybe…

First, she opened a set of doors opposite the entrance. They were locked, and Sunburst’s keycode had stopped working for some reason, but it didn’t take long for her magic to open it. Then she laid a hoof each on the two ponies and willed them moving again. A quarter of a second later, she’d telekinetically grabbed the trooper and flung him through the door before he could react. As he went sliding across the floor, she tried to reverse the process, pulling his chronons back out. It couldn’t be that different from freezing ponies in normal time, right?

It wasn’t. The soldier stopped moving and didn’t start up again. Just in case, Starlight closed the doors; once the stutter ended, he’d be stuck in there for a little while. Good enough.

The newly mobile Doctor was already in scientific mode and staring at one of the hovering crystal shards. He delicately poked at it; it moved slowly aside for a few seconds, then reality flickered and it was back where it had been. “Fascinating,” he muttered. “Utterly fascinating.”

“Yep,” Starlight mumbled. Of course, he’d focus on that, and not the fact that she’d thrown his attacker into a maintenance ar-

She blinked and whirled back on the door, agape. That was where she and Sunburst were going to be. She hadn’t thought of it back then, but why would an invading soldier take the time to close the door behind him?

He hadn’t. She had.

Starlight felt sick. She’d already been back. She hadn’t changed it before. She couldn’t change it now. She’d never been able to.

She glanced at a certain section of wall, right next to one of the racks. It was intact. Starlight swallowed guiltily — she was practically betraying her own philosophy — and blasted a hole in it. Behind it was a narrow crawlspace.

The Doctor’s attention was diverted from the shard. He coughed. “Ah, Starlight… what’re you doing?”

“Making sure Sunburst and I escape,” Starlight said.

“Sunburst and y-? Ah. Timey-wimey.” The Doctor coughed again. “I… suppose we should get going, then?”

Starlight nodded. “There’s only a few moments before time starts up again.”

It was surreal, walking through the halls again at the same time in the same circumstances. Starlight tried to confirm to herself that, yes, she was here, but she was also back there, but her adrenaline was running too high and it just made her head hurt even more. All she’d th-

“So what do you think?” asked the Doctor. “Stairs or elevator?”

“Uh, what?” Starlight asked, trying to get her train of thought back on track. “Oh, um…” A memory of a mare saying a certain something drifted vaguely through her mind. “Elevator.”

The Doctor looked a bit nervous. “Positive? Because I-”

“Elevator,” Starlight said solidly. “Definitely.”

“Alright,” the Doctor said. He took a nervous step back. “You’re the one who’s been here, after all.”

The elevator was close by, and they reached it just as time started running again, not passing a single Monarch soldier. Starlight thanked her luck. The doors opened the moment the Doctor pushed the call button. He darted inside, flattened himself against one of the side walls, and jabbed the button for the top floor. Which, thank goodness, had been the floor Starlight was going to suggest.

“Get back,” the Doctor hissed. He pointed at the wall opposite his. “We don’t want them to see you. Keep out of sight!”

Starlight sighed — it wasn’t going to change anything — but did as he said.

And right at that moment, a soldier exited from a side hallway. She wasn’t looking at the elevator, instead focusing on the hallway to the failsafe room. But then, that was where Starlight and Sunburst were supposed to come from, not the service elevator, and they didn’t have enough time to have gotten down here already. (Starlight guessed they were just going into hiding behind the racks.)

The soldier stood in place, looking down the hall. The elevator doors didn’t close.

The Doctor hammered on the “Door Close” button. “Come on, come on…” he whispered. “Move, you blasted bucket of bolts!”

And then, just as the doors started closing, Starlight deliberately stepped into view in the elevator and coughed.

The soldier’s head snapped to the elevator and she twitched. The doors met, and Starlight distantly heard her saying, “Target spotted in the service elevator! Withdraw!”

The Doctor was livid. “Just… just what in the blazes was that? You just-”

“-made sure Sunburst and I escape,” Starlight said flatly.

“…More timey-wimey?”

Starlight nodded. “Too timey-wimey. It’s making my head hurt.” She rubbed her forehead. “I can’t escape unless they see me, they can’t see me unless I go back in the future, I can’t go back in the future unless I escape. I feel like I’m chasing my own tail.”

Not just chasing her own tail. Eating it.

Ouroboros.

Maybe Serene wasn’t as crazy as she sounded.

“That’s all well and good-” The Doctor still looked a bit miffed. “-but now they know we’re in the service elevator, and… you do know there’s a limited number of exit points, yeah? They’ll have us pinned and-”

“And in a few minutes,” Starlight said, “another, much longer stutter’s going to come, and they’ll be frozen, and we’ll be fine.”

“Ah.” The Doctor looked away and rubbed the side of his leg. “This is quite the complex day, isn’t it?”

“Eeyup.”

The elevator reached the top floor, dinged, and opened and closed its doors without the passengers leaving. Somehow, they’d wordlessly agreed to wait in the elevator until the stutter hit. They both focused on the walls instead of each other. Talking wouldn’t do anything.

Starlight put an ear on the doors and listened closely. For a while, it was silent, but then she heard ponies gathering around outside. All of a sudden, she started panicking. What if they opened the elevator before the stutter hit? Of course they could open it. Elevators w-

Her head throbbed as the stutter hit. Why couldn’t she have that kind of luck when actually trying big things? She unfroze the Doctor and pried the doors open. On the other side was a squad of Monarch troopers, all watching the elevator, all frozen.

The Doctor took a moment to stare at the soldiers as Starlight looked at a nearby map to find the stairs to the roof. He waved a hoof in front of one of them. No response, naturally. “You know,” he said, doing the same to another, “in a less dire situation, this might actually be quite fun.”

“Yeah,” said Starlight. Whatever. She just wanted to leave. “Roof’s this way.”

It was barely any time at all before they went up to the roof and Starlight had levitated them down to the ground. The Doctor’s jaw dropped as he saw the sky, but Starlight was already thinking. “Okay,” she said, “our first try’s bunk. What do you think we should do?”

“Well,” the Doctor said, tearing his gaze away from the sky, “ideally, I’d want to take a look at your friend’s notes first, make a few last conclusions. He went in some directions that I didn’t, and I didn’t take in as much as I’d like.”

“Is it okay if you only do it for twenty minutes or so?”

“I suppose. Why?”

“I know just the place right near here.”

---

Sunburst’s Streamhaven Apartment, October 9
8:39 PM — 22 minutes after the Fracture in Time

With the two of them aiming for Sunburst’s apartment, they reached it just before the stutter collapsed. Unlocking it was easy, and soon the Doctor was examining Sunburst’s notes in the living room as Starlight paced, trying to wrestle her thoughts into submission.

She found herself telling the Doctor to not take any of the physical notes; Sunburst would need to take them to him in a couple hours. She kept glancing at the clock, making sure they had enough time to get out before she and Sunburst came back. She kept telling herself that you could change things, and yet she was devoted to making sure that she wasn’t changing her own timeline at all.

Maybe it was what she’d just seen down at the university, her own attempt foiled. Maybe she was getting stressed out and paranoid. Maybe seeing Serene so unflappable while causing the eventual end of time had rattled her. Maybe it was actually being back at her own events that had changed her, rather than being in some place she’d never been to for some event she’d never seen. Maybe one of a thousand different things. Whatever the cause, Starlight couldn’t shake a nagging feeling: keep the timeline straight.

For all her former confidence, now, the idea of things changing haunted her, like it shouldn’t happen. It kept poking at her, demanding she keep track of time so she could be away before her other self arrived. It told her she couldn’t try to contact herself. Couldn’t try to do anything that’d change her own course. It was one thing to try to change history for the better by stopping the fracture; it was another to do anything that might cause her past self to not enter the time machine. Better to just leave it be. The past was set, and that was that.

Was this what Serene was feeling?

The Doctor spoke up. He sounded down. “I think I’ve seen enough, and, ah…” He swallowed. “Yeah, we never had a chance. Paradoxes are impossible and self-defeating.”

“Great,” muttered Starlight.

“Although great whickering stallions, are these comprehensive.” The Doctor started talking fast again. “They cover far more than mine ever did. Boundary cases, to be sure, but I cannot believe I forgot about those. Did you know, these imply that if-”

“Uh-huh. And do you have any ideas on how to fix the fracture?”

The Doctor looked down at the notes again. “The beginnings of one. Dose the Neigher-Joy field with chronons and stitch it back together, in laymare’s terms.”

Hadn’t something like that been Sunburst’s initial idea? Starlight was sure it was. That was a good sign. He and the Doctor were thinking on the same page.

“The specifics elude me at the moment, I’ll admit,” the Doctor continued, “but I’ve barely had any time to think, and these circumstances are rather dodgy. I say we meet Sunburst back in the Everfree so the three of us can put our heads together and try to come up with something more solid.”

“Three of us?” Starlight asked. “I’d be barely any help at all. I don’t know anything about chronodynamics or whatever.”

The Doctor waggled a hoof at her. “There’s a saying I’ve heard: if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. You are the pony we’ll explain it simply to. If you can get a decent handle on it, we’re on the right track and Sunburst and I most likely understand it.”

That was actually something Twilight said from time to time. And she could explain magic simply if you reminded her not to use big words, so she definitely understood magic. Starlight felt a bit less down; at least she wouldn’t be completely useless.

“Shame to have to through all that forest yet again,” the Doctor said, “but that’s where Sunburst is.” He smiled. “Still, our trip there was uneventful the first time around, so we’ll be safe the next time, right?”

Starlight swallowed. “Not exactly,” she said quietly. “I… I think Serene’s going to try to kill him.”

Comments

[Thought Prism]

Ok, this is getting crazy in the best possible way. Continue.

[tsaukpaetra]

Keep your hope Starlight, Serene will-has accepted fatalistic determinism, but you're living proof of an exception!