Ruler of Everything

by Sixes_And_Sevens

Tooth and Claw

Dinky and Scootaloo arrived, somewhat out of breath, at the flower shop.

“Time?” Scootaloo demanded, panting.

Dinky thought. Frowned. Shook her head like she was trying to get water out of her ear.

“It’s stopped,” she said, perplexed. “Seven months.”

“It stopped?”

“Or it slowed way down,” Dinky amended. “Can’t be sure unless it ticks down again.”

Scootaloo sucked in her cheeks thoughtfully. “I’m guessing whatever this is, it’s not another chronic hysteria.”

“Hysteresis.”

“Whatever. It's not that.”

“No,” Dinky agreed, looking thoughtfully at the shop. “A time loop of about forty years would be a little much. It’s not another time-freeze, either, or stolen magic…”

“Do you have any idea what it is?”

“I have… ideas,” Dinky admitted. “One very good idea.” She set her jaw. “Let’s see if I’m right.”

She pushed open the door. The golden glow inside the shop was glaringly obvious. Scootaloo tried to walk in, but Dinky held up a hoof. “Not without protection,” she said, lighting her horn. A golden shield spell formed over them both.

Scootaloo looked at the shield. “Hey -- did you ever notice that your magic is the same color as the weird time energy?”

“Yeah. And both of them are the same color as the Time Vortex.”

“Wait. Really?”

“Yeah. I’m guessing it’s probably part of my ‘Time Lord Ancestry’ or whatever. Does it matter?”

“I dunno. I thought it might be some kind of clue.”

“I think this might just be the color of time-related stuff. Can we just go in now?”

“Hey, you’re the one who stopped me.”

Dinky rolled her eyes and trotted in. The golden energy washed over her shield, resulting in a shimmering play of golden light, like a plasma ball, washing over the two mares in the shield. It would have been pretty, if either Dinky or Scootaloo had noticed it. At the moment, however, they were pretty occupied with looking at Roseluck.

“A-ga!” Roseluck squealed, waving her hooves at the bright golden shiny.

Scootaloo pointed at the tiny form. “That’s a baby.”

“Yes, Scootaloo. I’m familiar with the concept,” Dinky said, her voice a register higher than usual.

“Roseluck has turned into a baby,” Scootaloo stressed.

“Yes, Scootaloo. A seven-month-old, I shouldn’t wonder. Miraculously, I do in fact have eyes!”

“G’boo,” Roseluck added.

“She’s in a diaper. Where did the diaper even come from?”

“I don’t know.” Dinky paused. “Better than the alternative.”

“Oh, yuck. So… how do we fix it?”

“Uh…”

“You don’t know? You knew for Caramel and Vinyl and Octavia!”

“I ran up and grabbed Caramel, and I learned about chronic hystereses from the Doctor. I don’t even know if hystereses is the right plural!”

Roseluck stared at the two mares, wide-eyed. Then she started to cry. Dinky and Scootaloo stared at her, horrified. Then they stared at one another, still horrified. “Please tell me you know how to deal with this,” Dinky whispered.

Scootaloo shook her head. “You?”

“May I remind you that I didn’t even particularly like children when I was a child?”

“Uh, um…”

“Listen, Scootaloo, as heartless as this sounds, we need to let baby Roseluck cry while we try to figure out how to reverse this.”

“Oh, c’mon. Take the shield down, I can rock her or something.”

“We’re forty years in the past. Depending on how that happened, if I take the shield down, there’s a good chance that you and I will cease to exist.”

“Huh?”

“Look out the window.”

“Okay… hey! That’s not the bowling alley.”

“No. It’s the cinema that was here forty years ago. This shop is living in the past, and you and me? We weren’t around back then.”

“So that means…” Scootaloo put two and two together and gulped. "Right. Bad idea."

Dinky frowned at Roseluck, tilting her head in thought. “Alright. Back out of the shop.”

“What? But--”

“I have a plan, but I can’t do it while I’ve got the shield up.”

“...Okay, fine.”

They trotted back into the present, Scootaloo taking frequent glances back at baby Roseluck. Dinky dropped the shield as soon as they were out. “Fine, so what’s the plan?” Scootaloo asked.

Dinky looked back into the flower shop and scowled. “First, I want answers.”

“Answers from who? I don’t think Roseluck is going to be particularly helpful.”

Dinky ignored her and trotted up to the threshold of the shop. “Alright, you. What are you?”

Scootaloo peered around Dinky. “Are you talking to the gold light?”

“Obviously.”

“...Why?”

“It can talk. I heard it. It called me a whelp.”

Scootaloo pursed her lips. “...Alright.”

Dinky looked sharply back at her friend. “Listen, believe me or don’t, but there’s clearly an intelligence behind these attacks. It couldn’t freeze a large area without me getting through and wrecking it, so it started causing effects in smaller areas. Last time I was able to get Vinyl and Octavia to help defeat it, and now Rose is in no position to do anything. I suspect that even Roseluck's presence here is meant to mock us -- it could have reduced her to a zygote, maybe even to sheer nothingness, but it left her here. I doubt that's coincidental.”

Scootaloo nodded. “That… does make some kind of sense.”

“It can hear me,” Dinky said, gritting her teeth. “It just won’t answer.”

“Considering its answer might include erasing us from history, I think I’m alright with that,” Scootaloo said.

Dinky grunted. “Fine.” She lit her horn again, and stared into the shop.

“Uh, Dinky? What are you--”

Baby Roseluck levitated off the ground and zoomed toward the door.

“DINKY!”

Roseluck the baby, too shocked even to scream, flew at the open door. As she passed the threshold, she underwent a virtually instantaneous transformation, knocking a hanging pot of petunias off its hook and sending it smashing to the ground. Roseluck the grown mare was flung out of her shop and promptly ate dirt when Dinky was unable to handle the change in weight quickly enough.

“Oh, Celestia! Are you alright?” Scootaloo ran to Roseluck’s side. Her muzzle was bloodied, and she looked deeply discombobulated. “Roseluck? Roseluck! Talk to me!”

The florist looked up into Scootaloo’s eyes, and with deep sincerity, said “I just went through puberty again in less than a second. My everything is messed up.”

Dinky, meanwhile, was studying the shop with no small satisfaction. “And the gold light is gone. As I thought, the phenomenon was centered on Roseluck. Otherwise it would’ve just reverted the whole shop back to the day it opened.”

“Dinky! Priorities?”

“Hm? Oh, yes. Roseluck!”

The florist’s head swiveled around. “Present, Miss!”

“Do you remember anything that happened just now?”

Rose’s pupils were blown out. “Remember? Yes. I remember everything.”

Dinky took a step back, unnerved. “Um, great! Can you tell us--”

“I remember what I had for lunch every day in second grade. I remember the exact sensation of getting braces. I remember lying in my crib and watching the mobile spin and being too frightened of it to move.”

“Um…”

“I remember everything.”

“So…” Dinky glanced at Scootaloo. “Do you want to get her sisters, or should I?”

Scootaloo glanced down at Roseluck. “Oh… I’d better do it, I'm faster. Can you keep her safe while I’m gone?”

Dinky looked offended. “How inept do you think I am?”

“You flung a baby through a door!”

“Yeah? And look, she’s completely fine!”

Scootaloo glared.

“...Mostly fine,” Dinky amended.

“I’ll hurry back.”

“Glad to hear it. Now go.”

Scootaloo raced off, trying desperately to let the adrenaline overtake her, to avoid thinking about how, whether she’d been there or not, the events that had transpired today would have worked out pretty much exactly the same way.

---

Still shaken from their ordeal, Vinyl and Octavia were grateful to have other ponies in the house for a little while. Sweetie Belle was an especially welcome guest, given that she could tell Octavia all about her time at Muilliard; Octavia, it happened, was an alumnus, and soon enough the two were cheerfully swapping stories. Octavia was quite pleased to hear that nopony had ever managed to remove the tuba that she and her friends had stuck over the head of the statue of the school’s founder.

Meanwhile, Apple Bloom had convinced Vinyl to help look for any clues that might explain the cause of the time loop, and so the two were inspecting every inch of Vinyl’s room.

The DJ sighed and turned away from her shelf of records. “Nope. Not a single one out of place. How’s my deck looking?”

Apple Bloom hauled herself out of the wiring of Vinyl’s left amp. “All looks fine ‘n’ dandy to me.”

Vinyl shook her head. “I don’t get it. It had to have started here, right? I was the first pony affected.”

“It affected the whole house, though,” Bloom pointed out. “Did anything, Ah dunno, out o’ th’ ordinary happen today?”

“No~oo,” Vinyl said. She put a hoof to her chin. “Unless…”

“Unless?” Bloom prompted.

“There was this guy who came around a little after Tavi left to go shopping. Said he was… a door-to-door salesman, I think. Never saw him before. Something about him creeped me out, so I told him… I told him…” Vinyl’s brow furrowed. “I definitely meant to tell him to scram.”

“But you didn’t?”

Vinyl took off her sunglasses and rubbed the bridge of her muzzle, like she was getting a headache just thinking about it. “I… I wanna say he left, first. And then I just… found myself back in my room, looking through my records.”

“Okay. An’ that’s when th’ loop started?”

“I… guess so.” Vinyl shook her head. “I didn’t even remember him until you started asking.”

“Well, sounds like we got us a prime suspect,” Bloom said. “D’you remember anything else about him?”

“Uh… definitely a dude, from what I could tell. He had a white coat, really bright, pure white. Like, whiter than Rarity. He was wearing something… black. A hat, maybe, or a tie.”

“Anything else? Pegasus, unicorn, earth pony? Didja see a cutie mark?”

Vinyl set her shades down and rubbed her eyes fiercely.

“Ah’ll take that as a ‘no’,” Bloom said. “Eye color, maybe?”

The noise that came from Vinyl’s throat was inequine. She reached out a hoof to steady herself on her turntable.

“What?” Bloom asked. “What’s th’ matter?”

Vinyl lit her horn and dragged Bloom closer until they stood muzzle to muzzle. “Bloom,” Vinyl said hoarsely. “I just realized what it was about him that creeped me out. Bloom, are you listening? He didn’t have a face.”

Bloom nodded, eyes wide. “Yup. Yup, Ah reckon that’d about do it. Definitely our new prime suspect, there. Uh, when you say he didn’t have a face, d’you mean like… just a blank slate?”

“No. It was like a mask, but it was his face. Mouth hole, nose holes, eye holes, but no features. And they moved, but they didn’t move like a pony’s would. It was like a puppet, but I thought it was a stallion. How did it fool me? How could I not have noticed? How could I have forgotten somepony like that?”

“Vinyl! Vinyl, breathe. In an’ out fer me. In an’ out.”

The unicorn nodded, forcing herself to comply.

“Now, name me five things y’all can see.”

“You.”

“That’s one, very good.”

“My deck. My bed. Pillows. Door.”

“Four things you can hear?”

“Your voice. My voice. My heartbeat.” Her face twitched in a small smile. “Octavia’s laughter.”

“Three things you can feel?”

“I think… I think I’m better now, Bloom. Thanks.”

“Any time.”

“Where did you pick up that trick?”

“Zecora. This cutie mark’s for fixin’ stuff up, y’know. That applies to thought processes as much as it does cabinet doors ‘n’ toasters.”

“I’m guessing toasters are easier, though.”

“Oh, yeah.” Bloom nodded. “Ah ain’t no expert in nothin’. Jack-of-all-trades, master of none, that’s me.”

“But better than a master of one.”

Apple Bloom tilted her head. “Pardon?”

Vinyl waved a hoof in a circle abstractly. “That’s how the rest of the saying goes. ‘Jack of all trades, master of none, but better than a master of one’.”

“Huh.” Bloom rubbed her chin. “Ya learn somethin’ new every day, Ah guess. Uh, d’ya feel up fer one more question?”

Vinyl hesitated. “...Yeah, alright.”

“Did ya happen t’ get the guy’s name?”

“Uh…” Vinyl’s nervousness gave way to concentration. “Shit. Yeah, he said it once. Uh, Valley? Valet? Um, maybe Viola? It was definitely longer than any of those, but that’s how it started.”

Apple Bloom nodded. “Alright. Ah’m gonna go tell all this t’ Sweetie, now. You gonna be good?”

Vinyl nodded, a little too quickly for Bloom to believe her. “Yeah. Fine.”

“Ah’ll get Octavia to come in.”

“What? No, she’s talking with Sweetie about music school. I don’t want to take that away from her.”

“Uh-huh. Well, Ah’ll jus’ mention th’ possibility that ya ain’t feelin’ so hot an’ look like you could do with some cuddles from yer wife, an’ she can do what she pleases with that information.”

Vinyl gave a ghost of a grin. “Yeah, alright. Thanks, Bloom. I mean it.”

“Yer most certainly welcome, an’ thank you for helpin’ me out.”

“It was nothing,” Vinyl said. That was obviously untrue, but Bloom had enough sense not to push. She just nodded and trotted out of the room.

“...So you don’t think I should continue on at Muilliard?” she heard Sweetie Belle say.

“Well, I didn’t say that,” Octavia said. “It’s just, well. There’s only so much they can teach you, you know. Once you get to a certain level of training, it’s really just a matter of keeping yourself in practice. And may I say, my dear, you seem to have reached that level and beyond. So, take it from a very successful music school dropout -- you needn’t stay there forever. Considering the tuition fees, it might be smarter to move on.”

Sweetie Belle hummed to herself. “I guess you’ve got a point,” she admitted. “I haven’t felt like I’ve been getting all that much better.”

“It’s the curriculum that’s the trouble,” Octavia said with a sniff. “All tied up in classical this and high-brow that. Wouldn’t know avant-garde if it kicked them in the flank. But it’s your choice, naturally. I just wanted you to know, you do have a choice.”

Apple Bloom pointedly stamped her hooves on the tile floor on the last few steps to the parlor. Octavia and Sweetie Belle fell silent as she rounder the corner into the room. “Howdy.”

Octavia smiled. “Hello, Bloom. May I assume my wife is in need of a certain amount of snuggles and cuddles and shnoogles and similarly cozy words?”

“Uh, Ah’d say that’s a fair assessment. How did you--”

Octavia scoffed. “Please. We’ve been married for well over a decade now. I may not understand much of what happened today, but I do know my wife. Feel free to sit and chat for awhile, but I fear Vinyl and I must retire for the foreseeable future. You don’t mind showing yourself out, do you? Good. Ta-ta!”

Octavia hurried out of the room. “Never fear, Vinyl! I shall vanquish your despair with the power of tackle-hugs!”

From the distance, both mares could hear a surprised noise, followed by a percussive crash. Sweetie shifted. “I feel like we should maybe go.”

“...Yeah. Yeah, this feels kinda intrusive, and Ah ain’t sure who’s intrudin’ on who.”

Together they trotted out the front door. “So,” Sweetie said. “Did you find anything useful?”

“Kinda. Vinyl remembered somepony mighty suspect around jes’ before th’ loop started. But Ah’ll keep that fer when all o’ us meet up again.”

Sweetie shrugged. “If you say so.”

“So, uh… what was that stuff y’all were talkin’ about with Octavia there? At th’ end?”

“Options for my musical career,” Sweetie said. “She thinks I could make it big as a pop star, or something like that.”

“Yeah. You could,” Bloom agreed. “Wouldja still keep livin’ in Manehattan? If ya did that, Ah mean?”

Sweetie thought about that. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Manehattan is fine, I guess, but it’s not really where I want to spend the rest of my life, y’know?”

Bloom nodded. “...Yeah. Yeah, Ah get that. Ah dunno. Sounds kinda nice, don’t it? Goin’ somewhere nopony knows yer name? Privacy’s got a nice ring to it.”

Sweetie frowned, her earlier conversation with Spike coming flooding back to her.

“That’s an interesting perspective,” she said carefully. “What makes you say all that?”

Bloom fell silent. After a moment, Sweetie pressed on. “I heard you were planning on leaving Ponyville.”

“Yeah. So?” There was a dangerous note in Bloom’s voice.

“So nothing. I was just curious why.”

“Why th’ Tartarus shouldn’t Ah? All of y’all did,”

“Well... yeah. For various reasons of our own. But, like... you're settled here. You've got a good thing going. I just wondered why you're moving away.”

Bloom snorted. “Don’t need a reason, do I? It’s mah life. Ah’ll live it how I want.”

“I’m not disagreeing with you. I just want to understand why you want this.”

Sweetie kept walking for several steps before she realized that Bloom had stopped in her tracks. She was shaking, and Sweetie almost reached out to comfort her. Apple Bloom looked up at her, and she froze. Her friend’s eyes were dark with anger. “Ya jes’ can’t mind yer own business, can you?”

Sweetie pulled back. “Bloom, it’s not that big a deal,” she said, uncertain.

“Not that big a deal? Ha!” Bloom shook her head. “Maybe not fer you. You ain’t got th’ family business ‘round yer neck like an albatross.”

Sweetie tilted her head. “You aren’t even in your family business.”

“Yeah! That’s kinda th’ problem!”

Sweetie took a few steps back. Bloom was breathing kinda heavily now, and her eyes were blazing. Some kind of gasket in Apple Bloom’s head had gone bust, and now all the anger that she left to build up and pressurize was spraying free. “You don’t know what it’s like,” she spat. “Ah’m an Apple. Y’know what that means? Farmin’. Growin’. Harvestin’. Sellin’ apples, and apple-related products. Know what it don’t mean? Bein’ th’ town handymare!”

Sweetie made the fatal mistake of trying to inject reason into the conversation. “But… Applejack and Mac fix stuff all the time.”

Bloom stormed forward, incensed, until she was nose-to-nose with Sweetie Belle. “Do either of them got a hammer on their flanks?”

Sweetie leaned back, for the first time really registering how much larger, how much stronger, Apple Bloom was than Sweetie herself. “No… no, I guess --”

“D’you see any apples on mine?”

“...No…”

“Ah am an Apple. An’ everypony knows that Apples work in apples. Ah’m th’ one that couldn’t cut it! Ah’m th’ one who had to leave th’ farm! An’ everypony in town knows Ah’m th’ failure!”

Sweetie blinked. “Wait. What? Who said that about you?”

“They’re all thinkin’ it,” Bloom growled, staring at the ground. “Ah know they are. How could they not be, when it’s as plain as th’ mark on mah flank?”

Sweetie gnawed at her lower lip. “Apple Bloom,” she said slowly. “Do you think it might... just be you thinking that?”

Apple Bloom's nostrils flared, her mouth drawing taut into a thin white line. “You’re as bad as the rest of them,” she said coldly. “You won’t admit it, either.”

She turned and stormed away, leaving Sweetie Belle stunned and silent in the middle of the street.

---

The Doctor whistled a half-remembered tune as he pored over the circuits of the TARDIS console. “Ah! The telepathic circuits need to be routed… through here. Yes, and I can afford to disconnect that for the time being --”

There was a bright flash and a plume of smoke rose from the central console. “Ah,” said the Doctor. “Apparently I can’t. Where did I leave that soldering iron?”

He trotted out of the room, still whistling to himself. After a few moments, the Interface raised its head and glared after him. “Imbecile. We should just turn off the part of his brain that remembers how to whistle.”

The central console lit up red, casting strange and distressing shadows around the room. “It would be… unwise to move too overtly this early on. If the Doctor recognizes our telepathic influence, it would be child’s play for him to block us out.”

“True,” the Interface said, grudgingly. “Telepathy was always among our stronger suits. But you’re worried about him noticing us? Now? If he didn’t catch on in the Crystal Empire, we’d have to make him punch himself in the face half a dozen times before he even considered that something might be amiss.”

“The hour of our apotheosis is nigh. Our perfect revenge will finally fall into our lap. This mealy universe will be ours for the taking, and you want to risk all that over whistling.”

“Oh… I suppose,” the interface said with poor grace. “Fine, then. If we aren’t going to erase the Doctor’s capability to whistle, we may as well at least plan our next strategy. It's been such fun to experiment with the capabilities of a TARDIS. Those blind idiots on Gallifrey prattling about theory..."

"The spare power has been useful," the console agreed. "That princess was plenty, though it's a pity she didn't die. It would have been such a delight to crush her head from the inside out... and that earth pony was an absolute stroke of luck. Where he could have gotten access to such a degree of unshielded artron energy, I can't even begin to guess."

"I believe he hasn't," the Interface corrected. "Yet. And soon, he never will."

"A paradox," the console mused. "Delightful."

"What shall we try next?" the Interface wondered. "We’ve stopped time, trapped somepony in a multiversal blind alley, reversed time, created a chronic hysteresis and a localized loop of time… what else can we try?”

“Accelerated aging?” The console flashed bright red. “Yes… trapped in a moment as they wither and die, screaming as their bones snap and their skin turns to dust. Somepony young, somepony that can make it last… one of those Cake children, perhaps?”

“No,” said the interface.

“What? Why not?”

“Accelerated time won’t get us any closer to our goals. Besides, turning a child to dust and bone is a surefire way to get the Doctor investigating. His moralizing won’t permit anything else. Then he’d notice us for certain.”

“Bah. For one child?”

“Absolutely.”

“He might not find out in time.”

“He almost certainly would.”

“It isn’t as though he noticed any of the others…”

“None of the others died.”

“Which is more the pity! Dead ponies tell no tales, and look what the red one is doing now! We should have just let her reach the end of the universe and fizzle out.”

The Interface gave an electronic sigh. “It’s times like these I wish we’d kept the Master, that time in San Francisco. American or not, at least he’d be a tiebreaker when you get like this.”

The console began to flash with a searing darkness, a kind of negative light. “Let me kill. Let me kill! LET ME KILL!”

The Interface's eyes flashed red. “Fine! But not a pony. You can age, I don’t know, a tree or something.”

“Not even the zebra?”

“Mmm…” the interface considered that. “No. If I can’t make him stop whistling, you can’t kill the zebra.”

“BUT I WANT BLOOD!”

“Then kill a bear! Fine, you know what? An entire ten-foot-radius section of the Everfree, far away from Ponyville, the hut, and the deer settlements. Any plant or animal in there is fair game.”

“Deal. It’s such a pleasure working with a lawyer of your caliber.”

“No need to get snitty. If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t have any access to this ship.”

“If it weren’t for me, you’d still be a shrinking probability lost in -- shush! Do you hear that?”

Down the hall, both entities heard a cheerful whistling growing ever closer. The interface quickly turned around into its original position, the light fading from its eyes. The inverted light in the console faded as well, brightening the room up. Nonetheless, dark shadows seemed to hang and drip across the walls.

---

Button led the way down into Twilight’s basement laboratory, Rumble close at his hooves. “It’s kinda weird that we haven’t seen anypony else yet,” he noted.

Button shrugged. “There’s only, like, four ponies who live here full time, and everypony is probably way more concerned about Twilight’s condition than they are about whatever’s down here.”

“Still. I was expecting somepony to be on guard or something. Something down there nearly killed a goddess.”

“Yeah. Good news on that front, though; it wouldn’t kill either of us.”

Rumble frowned. “Wait. What?”

Button nodded. “Yeah. Our reservoirs of magic are way lower, so channeling it all at once wouldn’t destroy us like it nearly did to Twilight. I mean, you would still lose all your magic, and all your feathers would probably burn off, and I probably wouldn’t be able to walk for a few weeks, and it would hurt. A lot. But, y’know, it wouldn’t kill either of us.”

“You’re a paragon of reassurance," Rumble muttered, peering into the shadows suspiciously. "How do you know all this, exactly?”

“Basic applied thaumodynamics,” Button said. “You really need to know this stuff when you’re working with magic-powered electronics.”

“Huh. Neat.”

They rounded a corner. “Boy, there are a lot of stairs in this place,” Button said.

“Yeah.” Rumble hesitated. “Hey, Button?”

“Uh-huh?”

“Not to put, y’know, too fine a point on it, but… why did you come along today?”

Button stopped and looked back at Rumble, clearly hurt. “Do you not want me along?”

“What? No, no, no. I’m actually really glad to see you again, man. It’s been too long. I meant more…” Rumble sucked in his breath, thinking. “You didn’t exactly seem, um. Eager? Not at first, I mean.”

Button glanced away. “I mean, I’m still not exactly thrilled to be chasing down something that could steal Twilight’s magic and do what we saw at Vinyl and Octavia’s house.”

“Why, then?”

Button looked up at the ceiling, considering his answer to that. “I dunno. Partly because everyone else was doing it, and I wanted to spend time with you guys. Partly because, well, somepony had to do something, so why not me? And partly…” he started off down the steps again, thinking about how best to put it.

“Partly, it’s because for the last few years, I’ve been building my life’s ambition. For the last year, I’ve been working on it alone. It’s… hard, out there in Copper Hills. It’s crazy, like Ponyville, but everyone’s turned that crazy in on themselves instead of out to the world. You get it?”

“Kind of,” Rumble said. “But what does that have to do with anything?”

Button was silent for a few moments. “That’s the sort of place Copper Hills is,” he said quietly. “That’s the kind of pony that lives there -- the tech giant geniuses, the electronic nouveau-riche, the people who think that everything -- ponies, social situations, politics -- are things that you can hack, that you should hack, as easy as you could a PacMule machine.”

Rumble arched an eyebrow. “Wow. That’s… that’s a lot to unpack.”

“And they’re the ponies I’m going to spend the rest of my life working with,” Button said, stopping and hanging his head.

“Oh,” Rumble said. “But -- I mean -- you’re nothing like that. Maybe you can turn them all around?”

“Maybe,” Button said without confidence. “Or maybe I’ll wake up one morning and sprinkle a microdosage of LSD in my eggs that I got from my decorative pet chicken.”

“...What?”

“Yeah. Practically all of them do at least one of those things, and the ones that don’t do some other weird trend that you and I can’t even imagine. So, y’know, I wanted one last adventure with my friends. I didn’t even think about stopping in Ponyville until the train broke down. I didn’t think about staying the night here. I was actually upset that I couldn’t go straight to Baltimare, can you believe that?”

“I mean, it does sound like an inconvenience," Rumble said, rubbing the back of his head.

“I don’t want to be that kind of pony, Rumble. But I do want to work in tech and gaming. It’s my whole life’s goal, and I can’t think of anything else I’d rather do. I have the opportunity, and the means, and the skills. So why aren’t I happy?”

Rumble looked down, lost for words. “I…” he trailed off.

Button looked away. “It doesn’t matter. Sorry for dumping all that on you.”

Rumble tried to say something, anything, to tell Button that he was there for him, that he believed in him, that he knew Button had the equilibrium and the heart to be himself. But nothing came. Envy choked the words in his throat. “We’re here,” Button said quietly, reaching for the door. A larger hoof came out of the darkness and grabbed the handle.

“Allow me,” said Sombra.

Comments

[FanOfMostEverything]

The florist looked up into Scootaloo’s eyes, and with deep sincerity, said “I just went through puberty again in less than a second. My everything is messed up.”

Highly understandable.

I remember lying in my crib and watching the mobile spin and being too frightened of it to move.

That is one theory for how they work. Babies' instincts think they're predatory birds.

Octavia was quite pleased to hear that nopony had ever managed to remove the tuba that she and her friends had stuck over the head of the statue of the school’s founder.

Exactly the bit of lightheartedness the story needed at that point.

This cutie mark’s for fixin’ stuff up, y’know. That applies to thought processes as much as it does cabinet doors ‘n’ toasters.

I get the feeling that's going to come in very handy. A shame Bloom can't easily use it on herself.

Octavia hurried out of the room. “Never fear, Vinyl! I shall vanquish your despair with the power of tackle-hugs!”

Relationship goals.

"The hour of our apotheosis is nigh" certainly ranks high on the list of sentences to be concerned about. Though at least we're getting a better look at just who we're dealing with.

It’s crazy, like Ponyville, but everyone’s turned that crazy in on themselves instead of out to the world.

That's a legitimately disturbing image.

Getting closer to the heart of the matter, and some of our heroes' issues are coming to a head in the meantime. Today is going to leave a lot of heartache in its wake. Hopefully it'll be worth it in the end.

[Shilic]

I have a sort of unexplainable soft spot for Tooth and Claw, I don't really know why. I really like the Doctor and Rose's chemistry, I like how David Tennant gets to use his real accent, I dunno, I just really like that episode. I don't know how other people feel about it, but it's one I've gone back to more than once.

Well, this is deeply concerning. Not only is the Valeyard who is also the Watcher who is also a pony going around causing trouble, but it seems like he's been inside the TARDIS since at least the events of the TV movie, which means he's been there for two Time Wars (one of which I think never actually happened becuase of time shenanigans?). And not only that, another sinister presence who is probably the Nightmare is there too? The TARDIS now retroactively feels a lot less safe...

[Coyote de La Mancha]

Sweetie gnawed at her lower lip. “Apple Bloom,” she said slowly. “Do you think it might... just be you thinking that?”

Oh, man. I have been in Sweetie’s position. It’s never good. Poor... well, both of them, really.

And then, that discussion between Button and Rumble. Owitch.

And now we finally hear the villains of the piece, and get our first clues as to their identities. Beautifully done.