Trixie and Starlight Glimmer experiment with time magic.
Originally written for the Writeoff Association's short story contest.
Chapters (1)
- Member Since 19th Jun, 2012
- offline last seen Dec 24th, 2020
zaponator
If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist, it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity.
zaponator
Joined 19th Jun, 2012 ·
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okay, must be something sinister. Starting reading from the end.
right.
Ah yes, libraries. The most optimal place to practice hurricane spells of all colors.
Rip Starlight's ego.
Starlight refers to her friends as objects now, hmm?
Ouch, that ending. This was wonderful.
Magificent.
Simply magnificent.
~Skeeter The Lurker
8611199
You wanted to read the end, so you got the end. Mission accomplished?
8611357 No, because then I read the beginning, as usual.
It's a tragic story and not marked so, meaning it's a trick story. Which is expected, there are a lot of these currently.
8611387 It sure is sad, but I wouldn't call it tragic. A tragedy is where the protagonist fails, or doesn't accomplish their goals. Starlight and Trixie not only made it home, but they made future Twilight's life- a life she herself said had been well-lived- brighter at the end. They survived, succeeded and even surpassed what they needed to do.
And anyway, it says in the description it was for a Writeoff called Here at the End of All Things. That's a plenty good "might not be a happy story" warning to me.
8611387
I didn't think it was all that tragic. Where's the tragedy in living a long happy life?
That's like saying the universe is a tragedy because everything in the universe has an end.
8611425
What Twilight says or feels then, doesn't matter, that's but a moment of emotion. If they managed to do it, fine, but they did a very minor thing.
Preventing that big thing is what they, and Twilight, should be worried about.
If that can't be avoided, constantly unwinding time (and arranging next generations of ponies to keep doing it) might buy them any time they need
As soon as Starlight started looking around the room instead of celebrating I figured out what she was planning. 10/10
This reminds me of something i'd just start randomly thinking aboout while pacing in my room and making myself cry with.
Except this is a story I can read and remember. This is definately going on my user page favourites list.
edit: Now if only you could give mother of invention an ending like that.
You understand
Mechanical hands
Are the ruler of everything.
ahhh!
Ruler of everything.
ahhh!
I'm the ruler of everything
In the end.
That was a really wonderful read, Zap. Not only did it tug at all of the right heartstrings but I thought your Starlight and Trixie were 100% spot-on.
Say! Let's play with time! -every guy who almost destroyed the universe ever
I swear if this happens to be a Breath of the Wild reference.
And then she figured that tile plan in mere seconds after hearing this. Starlight has always been a smart girl.
In the end it's really tragic that ponies had never went >= Kardashev II in all that time and now have to perish like that.
Good stuff!
That was amazing! Great characterization of Glimmy and Trixie! Sweet ending! Loved it!!!
That was beautiful.
This story is criminally underserved. This needs to be read more as an excellent starlight story. Thank you and keep up the great work.
Damn it didn’t know there was a hidden sad tag somewhere!
Why you do this?
They are lucky there was still oxygen available to be breathed rather than chemically bound into the rocks.
8612620
I think the scenario was the dead of their universe, not just the Sun. After all no amount of development can overcome the inherent entropy of the universe as far we know.
8613369
That's why I asked for Kardashev II
Judging from the final firework, the Sun still had a lot of juice (and only a tiny fraction of it's output had been used in a first place). So removing significant part of Sun's mass by starlifting to prevent it from blowing up and extend it's life by a couple orders of magnitude sounds like a good idea (and, of course, very impressive Kardashev II feat).
Poor Moondancer.
Reminds me a bit of the end of Arthur Clarke's 9 Billion Names of God:
“Look,” whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.)
Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
8613806
So Celestia needs to go on a diet then? Got it...
Excellent story.
Too late, she already has
8611432
But is that not true?
That there, within the universe, are countless tragedies?
We can only hope that ours are as poetics as this one.
(Seriously though, this story really isn't a Tragedy)
I didn't read it yet, But, knowing the secon law of thermodynamics (Entropy tends always to go up), it got me thinking...
If you travel to the past, you are reversing the time, and therefore reducing entrophy. The entrhopy of the universe, though, will increase, because now there are two yous in history, using energy and increasing enthropy. Therefore, Time travel does not reduce entropy, you just "go" to a place where you can create nore enthopy. This accelerates the heat death.
Also, if you know the universe is near an end (imagine the last civilization, living around a white dwarf, knowing that it's energy is slowly decreasing, and than in some years they will be all dead, and billions of years after, the last Black hole will desintegrate) in that scenario, thanks to the self preservation instinct, they would tend to travel to the past, but that just makes the universe's life shorter, making them travel even more in the past.
This means, either time travel is not possible, because if it was, the universe would be already dead, or it's possible, but never used, to preserve the universe's life. Sorry Sci-Fi fans.
That ending...I almost forgot just how far and/or back you have to think when dealing with time travel and chronophysics in general
Somehow I feel this video is relavent to the story
I like the idea of Twilight being the last pony. What an ending!
Neat.
8616139
Or it simply hasn't happened in this galaxy at that level. I mean there is a "you can't get there from here" phenomenon going on right now that essentially makes it impossible to ever get to galaxies outside the closest few. Assuming the "can't travel faster than the speed of light" thing is still in-force then it may simply mean that time travelers have a limit to how much of the universe they can really foul up.
8617790
hm, that actually makes sense!
of course, it wouldn't be the kind of time travel we want, but ñeh, close enough.
ÑEH
Reminds me of The Last Question
Beautiful stuff, though I too find it sad that ponies never made it out of their planetary cradle. Still, great pacing and emotion. I especially like the bit with Trixie's sense of the lay of the land. Always nice to see people acknowledge that there’s more to her than just Starlight's even more irresponsible foil.
Thank you for this.
I recognized you as a fellow Jurist, zaponator, and gave this story a read. FANTASTIC! Excellent brevity, characters true to form, yet true to the demands of dramedy and pacing!
8612000
Hey, it totally wasn't their fault this time!
They just happened to be in the viscinity when the sun went supernova, you cant prove anything!
8619420
Agreed, though i noticed Twilight said Equestria prospered for eons, and the ponyville and Canterlot ruins were still recognizable, so perhaps ponykind quickly did colonize the stars while the patriots of them stayed with the sentimental Alicorns as they tended to the planet and its places as massive swaths of National Park or a whole Sacred Garden World or Planetary Museum Exhibit "The Cradle Of Harmony" with the alicorns as its curators. Or maybe all of the above, with the planet later reshaped to match old memories during the Empire's fading days.
Alternately, their universe really is as small as the eye can see, having originally been an artificially constrained highly magic dense personal pocket dimension retreat for some creator entity this entire time.
There was a cancelled story i read once that was all about a scientist self-insert discovering the many ways Equus was similar in its physics yet different in its parameters, with lots of drama when he communicated the distance of a single light year to the ponies only for them to explain that it was longer than their universe was wide.
Don't ever change, Trixie.
Do I need to get a Planet of the Apes reference ready?
In all seriousness though, this was a beautiful story.
We might need to keep the site handyman at the ready, because I'm going to hit the fave button so hard here in a second...
One unsolved question is who Twilight was expecting to see on Equestria’s last day.
Was it Cadance who is of a similar age? The alicorn Faust who was present at the beginning?
My guess is Mort, the Pony of Death from the great, influential, but sadly unfinished story Mort Takes a Holiday.
8673405
No need to guess, the answer is right here.
It is criminal that this story had so long languished in my Read-it-Later.
This was amazing in so many ways, fantastic job!
You can has review!
Superb!
Heartbreaking and beautiful in equal measure. Bravo!!
SHE SAID THE THINGG-
Edit: I cried at the end-
8617790
I think the case is "Hasn't been happening." Or something. Tenses get weird when time travelling.
8616139
Oh much longer than billions. The evaporation time for the supermassive black holes is on the order of 10 raised to the 107th power seconds, or around a googol years, and as galaxies within a cluster coalesce, they will actually gain enough mass to bump that up a few order of magnitude.
While well-written, I've never been too fond of this sort of premise. Besides the questions brought up by that sort of immortality, there is the old 'Sci-fi writers have no sense of scale' trope... but that's a whole Astronomy lecture.
Damn it, I wasn’t expecting to cry today.