Chapter 1
Twilight always got nervous during interviews.
It didn’t matter how many of them she did or how many went well. No matter how friendly the press or how thorough her training, the thought of being in front of reporters made her heart flutter. Self-consciousness could be difficult for her. It made her pace, and preen her wings when they were already neat.
But she had a system. A checklist. She could remember to go through the checklist, and if everything on the list was in good order, she would feel good as well.
Item 1: Interview Questions
- Have you reviewed the interview questions in advance?
- Is the censor there? Do they think the questions are fair?
- Have you written cliff notes on how to answer each one? One paragraph or less so you don’t have to check your notes in the middle.
Twilight checked over her notes, and confirmed that every question was there. She had a summary answer for each one. And she knew the censor. His name was Black Out, and he was friends with the reporter. More than friends, Twilight suspected.
They kissed a lot, that is. Which was good. When the censor and the reporter were friendly, the result was always better. Twilight marked Item 1 as complete, and felt a little better.
Item 2: Personal Appearance
- Are there going to be cameras and/or a live audience at this event? (If no, skip Item 2 and proceed directly to Appendix 1: Optional Questions, Section 3)
- Have the royal designer ponies approved everything you’re wearing? (Saddle bags, jewelry, crown, etc)
- Is your mane brushed to the makeup ponies' satisfaction?
- Did you make sure your eyeshadow is on straight?
And so it went. Item 2 got all the way to J before Twilight marked it as done. It made her feel better, just as checking off Items 3, 4, 5, and 6 made her feel better. The last item, Item 7, was the shortest of them all.
Item 7: Emotional Support
- Is a good friend or family member there in case you need the help?
Twilight had both. Light Step and Double Time were both attending -- sitting together across the room with their hooves intertwined. Twilight smiled and waved, and Light smiled and waved back. Double looked at the floor. She wasn’t the waving type.
By the time the interview started, Twilight was something approaching calm.
“And,” a camera pony raised a leg. “Go.” The reels of film inside the cameras started to turn, the soft chopping of the sprockets filled the air, and Twilight smiled at the reporter.
“Your highness,” the reporter said, bowing low to the floor. His name was Op Ed. “Welcome to my program. It’s a pleasure to have you here tonight.”
“Mr. Ed,” Twilight bowed her head a fraction of an inch. Enough to be respectful, without implying an equivalence between them. “The pleasure is all mine. I’m quite the fan of your work.”
They exchanged pleasantries. Op asked how Twilight was doing, about her most recent friendship adventure, and about her decision to dye the tips of her wings like all the young pegasi were doing these days. She asked him about his show, his family, and about the new sitcom he was developing.
There was one small snag, when he asked about the war and Twilight said it was “terrible.” But Black Out stepped in and paused the cameras, they briefed her, and recorded it again with Twilight saying: “It’s terrible what Queen Amaryllis is doing to our crystal pony friends.” So no harm came of it.
After the opening was done, Op got to the meat of the interview. Shifting seamlessly from an anecdote about his son, he asked: “So, if I wanted to marry him up in the world, are you available? I promise, he’s very eligible.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Twilight blushed, but her notes said she was supposed to blush at that question. “How old is he?”
“How old are you?” And there was it.
“I’m sixteen. Can’t you tell?” Twilight flashed her wings with the colored tips to the cameras, and both she and Op Ed smiled. “But no, seriously, I’m thirty-eight. I just don’t always act it.”
“So tell me, how does that work?” He folded one hoof over the other, leaning forward on his desk. “Because ponies have so many questions.”
“Oh, trust me, I know.” Twilight sighed and rolled her eyes. “You know, I once had a pony walk up to me on the street, stare at my head and go, ‘so you can’t ever grow up?’ And I pause and say, I guess, why are you asking? And they go ‘so that’s basically a magical lobotomy, right?’”
Op Ed snorted his coffee. Twilight laughed, and they both riffed on the joke for a second. “And no! No. Of course not.” She pressed her hoof to her chest. “My mind is probably sharper than yours -- no offense. I learn, I grow, I assimilate new information. And I make new friends. But, biologically, developmentally, I’m this age forever.”
“I’m sure our viewers would love to hear an example.”
“Sure, here’s an easy one — coffee.” Twilight lifted a hoof. “When I ascended and became an alicorn, I was iffy about coffee. I didn’t know if it was for me. I was more of a tea sort of mare. Tried it later, turns out, I love coffee. It’s amazing.”
“I heard Ponyville has a Starbucks now.”
“Don’t start that joke again.” She flicked a hoof his way. “But every morning when I wake up I still feel uncertain about coffee. Because that was my emotional state then, and so that’s my state for good. I remember that I like coffee, I remember how coffee tastes, but somehow…” She drew the word out. “I don’t know! I’m a little nervous.”
“Well, that sounds like a mild inconvenience if ever I heard one.” He flashed the camera a winning smile. “And how do you deal with it?”
“I have a system. It’s very simple. I put a sticky note on the coffee machine that says, ‘you like coffee.’ I see it every morning and remember, oh right! So I do.”
The conversation between them paused for a half a second. Twilight’s smile turned stiff. “It can be a little bit of a pain, but it’s a small price to pay for life eternal.”
Twilight flew home from Canterlot under her own power. She didn’t feel like taking the train, and it had been a little while since she got to stretch her wings. She landed on the castle balcony, and carefully nudged open the door to the bedroom. It was dark by the time she arrived, and the thin shaft of moonlight from the door cast long shadows in the unlit interior.
Her horn glowed, and the lamps came alight.
Every single object in her bedroom was covered in at least three sticky notes. Some were carpeted, floor to ceiling. The pegboard on the wall had so many items hung on it that it threatened to fall from its mount.
Twilight grimaced. “Maybe this new system isn’t working out so well.” She took in a deep breath. “Spike!”
No creature answered her. The castle was empty.
“Right.” Twilight let out a slow breath. “Spike’s gone now. Okay, that’s fine. I need to get a new assistant. I’ll just…”
She pulled a sticky note from a pad, and with flawless penmanship wrote: Need a new assistant. Hire a replacement for Spike.
She looked around the room, scanned its nooks and crevices, and found a place on her nightstand that didn’t have any paper yet. “I’ll put it here so I don’t forget.”
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Old.
It's like 51 first dates, or whatever it's called.
Forgetting every day, endless loop..
After binging Around the World In 81 Days (and how did that one ever slip by me????) that last part was particularly soul gouging.
On one hand, emotionally looping sounds like a sort of mental hellscape, because all time-loop stories present eternal repetition as just that. But the world will change around Twilight, save roughly three or four other living, breathing constants. I wonder if that's a good or bad thing for someone who in many ways is developmentally stagnant; if she even truly is. Twilight may wake up every morning iffy about coffee because she's spending a lot of her time worrying about and spending headspace -and by the looks of it- physical space on coffee. She's iffy about coffee because she's always worried about whether or not she's iffy about coffee.
There is also something mentioned in your last installment that struck me, about how she continues to relearn friendship lessons. Part of that sounds sad, invokes pity, but another part. Well. Twilight loves learning, and now, there is no limit to that.
Um, if she constantly forgets things like that she likes coffee or that Spike no longer works for her, to the point she has to leave notes to remind herself, she's not assimilating new information. That's like writing an essay on a computer and forgetting to save. If anything it sounds more like she's got extremely early onset alzheimers.
Honestly that would explain a lot about your fic verse's alicorns and why things are going to crap with Amarylis. She's obviously learned fron Chrysalis' and her own mistakes, wheras the alicorns, possibly minus Flurry, can't, thus they can't adapt to Amaryllis's more subtle approach.
Mild inconveniences like these are the worst inconveniences.
Major inconveniences go away after some time, but no, these inconveniences just have to stick with you to your grave.
after reading the ending of the first chapter
How does this not have a "Dark" tag?
after reading the beginning of the second chapter
HOW ON EQUUS DOES THIS NOT HAVE A DARK TAG?!
Yeah.
I came to this story thinking that the premise might be stupid, that it might be no deeper than "Oh, Twilight is physically sixteen which means that she is physically below the Hollywood Age of Consent, which is not only now interstate and international but now apparently also applies to a totally-different biological species whose alien culture is at a level of development only vaguely similar to any real Human ones." And if it had been that I would have roasted it. The more so because I've thought a lot about this particular issue, and, in addition, a liberal multi-species civilization would have no problem dealing with someone who merely looked younger than she really was (heck, we have little problem with that, as some Humans are more neotenous than others and hence may well look around 14-16 when actually being in their late 20's -- I married into a whole family of people with that trait, my wife and her sisters are all absurdly baby-faced).
But this ---
What you're basically saying here is that Twilight Sparkle can learn new information, but she can't really use it to change beyond a very superficial level. Because in your timeline she Ascended at sixteen, and at that age she didn't yet have any serious interest in the opposite sex (beyond "I suppose I'll get married someday, I sure hope I meet somepony nice," if even that much), she NEVER CAN. Or mature in any other significant emotional way.
Not only does that mean that she is stuck forever at the emotional level of an (admittedly smart, brave and quick-thinking) sixteen year old teenage filly, it also means that she can't emotionally-adapt to life changes, such as Spike growing up and moving out on his own. Even more horribly, it means that she won't be able to emotionally-adapt to the inevitable deaths of friends and loved ones. (Even if Pony biological immortality is attained while her loved ones are still alive, she'll still lose them over the centuries to a drizzle of combat fatalities and accidents).
What happens to Twilight Sparkle a half-millennium or millennium from now, when if there's no biological immortality yet, every other real friend she has save for three other Alicorns (Flurry Heart is post-Ascension so she doesn't count), maybe five other Alicorns (assuming the rest of the Mane Six also Ascend, and she'll keep emotionally being unable to assimilate their Ascension), a Chaos God, and (hopefully) Spike the Dragon are dead?
In most versions of this scenario, Twilight makes new friends and goes on. She finds lovers or gets married, more than once (this itself is tragic, but at least she can always hope to find love again after her old husband dies). She has children and eventually becomes the matriarch of a huge clan. And she retains superpowers and eternal youth and good health, which certainly helps reconcile her to her situation.
But in your version of the scenario, she just gets more and more lost as the world changes around her, until eventually she's one of the few Ponies left who even remembers Industrial Age Equestria, and the remote descendants of today's Equestrians are building megastructures among the stars -- which she finds wonderful, but can never really emotionally understand -- even though such would have been among her teenage dreams. She is, perpetually, Hypatia at NASA.
Yeowch. That is dark.
At first, I wondered why this story had the dark tag.
"This looks like it'll be a light-hearted story about Twilight being youthful and forever adorkable and immature"
And it kind of *is* a story about that. But it definitely earns the "dark" tag, as it shows you her ongoing Hell.
Mr. Ed.
The talking horse.
Reporters and interviews use talking heads a lot. Here, it’s talking ponies—or horses.
Wow.
I’m so glad you put that there. It makes me happy.
Thats actually kinda sad. What kind of life is it where you can't move on?
9581870
That is terrifying. It’s like a sort of emotional Alzheimer’s at that point. Memory-wise you’re fine but your emotions can’t move on, and always reset to how they were, unable to reconcile decades or centuries of difference.
I wonder how the other alicorns handle it.
Would Flurry Heart ever grow up physically? I’m assuming she would as a natural born alicorn but it’s freaky to think about:
You have a memory spell. Stories already have problems with logic
9580969
Nah, the worst inconvenience is death.
Only if you are so stupid that you would not get rid of them yourself for eternity
9581870
prove that their death is inevitable