• Published 19th Aug 2012
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PonyFall: The Dawning of Twilight - MrBackpack



Twilight Sparkle was more than confident that Discord was going to reset into his stone prison

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Chapter 3: Through the Looking Glass

Chapter 3: Through the Looking Glass

My name is Twilight Sparkle.

Silence.

It was as if the world had cut itself off from my senses. I couldn’t breathe, see, or feel anything. Images of a pretty particular purple unicorn pranced proudly around my mind. Her voice, almost as familiar as my fiance’s, echoed in my mind as she crafted one of her famous letters to her powerful mentor:

Dear Princess...

The actual words of each letter faded in and out of obscurity with only her closing lines, normally dictated to her assistant, able to be fully understood.

Your faithful student,
Twilight Sparkle

As the world slowly returned, I could feel Michelle’s hand, tight and white-knuckled, still gripping my shoulder and faintly shaking. I didn’t have to see her face to tell that she had seen something similar to what I had.

Twilight seemed to have missed our entire ordeal and had returned to eggs.

We sat in silence, my mind trying to rationalize the hallucination...

“Man,” I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose. “It is way too early.”

The young woman, I refused to call her Twilight, looked up from her plate.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Look,” I said, dropping my hand from my face and looking her in the eyes. “I don’t know who hired you or put you up to this, but it’s far too early to be saying things like that and have any chance of me taking you seriously.” I paused for a moment before continuing with a chuckle. “Especially after last night.”

“Last... night?” she queried with a cock of her head. “What happened last night?”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose with a weary sigh and shrugged my fiance’s hand off of my shoulders.

“Last night...” I fired back with all the bitter sarcasm I could muster. “You know, where you were passed out in my backyard naked as a jaybird. I don’t know how you got there, nor do I really want to know why, but you were there nonetheless.”

There was a pregnant pause, broken only by Emma licking at the young woman’s toes.

“So,” I continued before she could get in a word edgewise. “All I want right now is for you to tell me where I can drop you off so that I can go back to enjoying the rest of my day off.”

“Oh!” she exclaimed, perking right up in a manner that was more than slightly disturbing. “I’m really sorry, but if you could direct me back to Ponyville-”

“Just stop,” I interrupted her, holding my hand up and rubbing the bridge of my nose with the other. “Look, I get it. You’re supposed to make me believe that, not only are you supposed to be a pony, but that YOU’RE Twilight Sparkle.”

The silence fell back over the kitchen. I don’t think that she expected me to doubt her identity.

“Just let me know where I can drop you off. I’ll even take care of whatever fees.”

“I don’t think that you’ll have to worry about any fees,” replied the young woman with an awkward smile. “I’m sure that the princess will be able to take care of anything that needs to be paid for.”

“Will you just drop it!” I snapped.” I don’t know who hired you or for what, but this really takes the cake. I get enough shit from the others at work for ponies, let alone the crap that my friends give me. I certainly don’t need anymore from some girl I found in my backyard.”

I glared at her, angry and more tired than I thought that I was. It had been a long week: The combination of long hours at the hospital and the constant ribbing from the other nurses for being a brony had finally gotten the better of me. I knew, somewhere in the back of my mind, that I shouldn’t be taking it out on her, but I had reached my breaking point.

“You,” I continued, pointing my finger at her and furrowing my eyebrows, “are not Twilight Sparkle. I don’t know who you are or where you’re from or how you know that I am a brony, and frankly, I don’t give a damn. All I want is for you to finish your breakfast, tell me where I can drop you off and for you to get on your way out of my life.”

My voice had begun to raise through that last tirade and by the time I was finished speaking, I was shouting at the purple haired young woman.

She had shrunk back into her chair, staring at me with her large violet doe-like eyes, her bottom lip quivering in the slightest. I felt shame beginning to creep into the edge of my mind as I continued to glare at her, and I knew that Michelle would make me pay for the horrible treatment of the young woman later.

The silence that fell between the three of us was heavy. The young woman was looking down at her hands and I could see that there were tears welling up in her eyes. It pulled at my heartstrings.

I rubbed my temples in an attempt to rein in my temper. I had no right to take it out on this young woman, no matter what the circumstances were. It wasn’t that she was a young woman - dad had always taught me that a Southern Gentleman should never vent his ire on to one of the fairer sex - but it was the she was my guest.

My guest.

The weight of those words pressed down in my like the entirety of the Encyclopedia Britannica that Michelle and I had received as an early wedding gift.

I opened my mouth to say something, anything, but the words died in my throat and I vapor locked. There was nothing that I could say that could make this situation any better, I had really let it hit the fan, and now I was covered from head to toe.

Taking a deep breath, I started again, the words finding their way out of my mouth:

“Look,” I said, my voice still carrying a bit of the charge that had filled it just moment ago. She shrunk back into her chair, trying to get as far away from me as possible. “I’m sorry miss, that was wrong of me to say-”

Michelle snorted and cut me off, walking over to the girl and helping her to her feet. “Let’s get you cleaned up and into some real clothes.” She glared at me as she walked the violet-haired girl out of the kitchen.

Without a word of complaint in my mind, I gathered up the various dishes, utensils, and the pan from the stove and began to wash.

It was nearly an hour later before Michelle and our guest appeared out of our room, the latter now dressed in some of Michelle’s clothes that seemed to fit her rather well. The two of them walked over and sat on the couch in front of the TV with plenty of room between the two of them. I didn’t know what went on between the two of them, all I know was that Michelle was sporting a rather impressive blush and the young woman looked rather nonplussed.

After a second to collect my thoughts, I joined them, choosing to stand in front of the couch rather than to sit on the ground or try to sit between them.

“So...” I started before trailing off. I didn’t know what to say that would make up for just yelling at her out of the blue. There was no possible excuse that I could give to her or my fiance that would make this situation any better than the fiasco that I had already stirred up. I sighed. “There’s really nothing that I can say to you, Miss, that could explain my conduct from just a little while ago.”

She was regarding me with her inquisitive purple eyes that I, despite telling myself that it was my own mind playing tricks on me, found familiar. Her gaze was intense and studious, as though she really hadn’t seen anything like me before.

This young woman was one hell of an actress.

“Be that as it may,” I continued, trying to ignore her unwavering stare, “I want to apologize for how I treated you. It was unbecoming of a brony and a gentleman, and inexcusable to the guest of my house.”

Still, she didn’t respond, but I did detect a slight softening of her gaze.

“Do you think that we could start over?”

She smiled and said, “Sure.”

For the next couple of hours, our conversation was nice enough. It still felt wrong to call my guest Twilight Sparkle, regardless of how much she looked like her equine counterpart from the show. The three of us slowly got to know each other somewhat. Michelle and I already knew most of what the young woman could tell us about Twilight Sparkle. There were enough differences in her story as compared to the show that I knew I was right in thinking that she had been exceptionally well coached to deal with me.

Of course, with my detail-oriented mind, it didn’t take very long for the discussion to turn heated once Michelle and I started to really ply her with questions regarding her background, and comparing her answers to what we knew from the show. She had everything that I could remember down pat, little details that my fiance knew better than I did, and some stuff that we had seen in our peripheral vision but hadn’t really paid attention.

What really threw us for a loop where the minor details that she added every now and then that, at first, seemed like minor aspects that we could have missed. But as the conversation wore on, they became more and more detailed and elaborate, describing events that were certainly outside the aspect of the show. She described a game of ‘hoofball’ that she had attended due to Applejack’s insistence. Big Mac was a very popular player in the Ponyville minor circuit. The game seemed to be rather similar to rugby in its nature and level of violence.

I had reached the point where I had had enough with the charade. It had been interesting enough to hear her inventions and creative mind on how the ‘real’ Twilight Sparkle would actually live and how Equestria was really like, but enough was enough.

“Fine,” I interrupted one of her more long-winded explanations on something or other. I had stopped paying attention. “Prove it.”

“Prove what?” she replied, her head cocking to one side like it usually did when she was confused.

“I want you,” I said evenly, jabbing a finger at her, “to prove to me, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you are Twilight Sparkle.”

“Okay,” she replied just as evenly, her eyes locking with mine. “I thought that was what we were doing.”

“No. Stories and lectures are something that anyone could make up and make sound believable, not counting that your history doesn’t match with the show. No, I want you to perform a spell.”

“A spell,” she deadpanned, her eyes half-lidded in apparent boredom. “Which one?”

“You decide,” I shot back, hiding my shock at her easy acceptance of the challenge. “You won’t be able to do it.”

She glared at me, a fire behind her eyes.

“Fine,” was her only reply before she shut her eyes in apparent concentration. I gave her some credit for making the act as believable as she could.

Michelle sighed and crossed her arms over her chest and Emma jumped up into her lap. The three of us sat in an uncomfortable silence as the young woman scrunched up her face in intense concentration, her hair lightly moving in the air current of our constantly-on AC unit

“Yeah,” I snarked, a sneer on my face showing that I’d finally gotten fed up with her just sitting there.. “You’re Twilight Sparkle alright. Whatever. Can’t even perform one lousy spell. At least you had the decency not to bring Spike with you.”

I could see the anguish in her eyes as she opened them to look at me.

“But,” she stammered, tears beginning to form at the base of her violet eyes. “I don’t understand. Levitating you out of your chair should’ve been one of the easiest things that I could do.”

I wanted to say something. Something comforting, something other than to voice the anger and annoyance that was already finding its way out of my mouth.

“It’s okay dear,” Michelle said, thankfully cutting me off before I could stick my foot in my own mouth yet again. But there was nothing that Michelle could come up with to comfort our guest.

This time there was no stopping the tears that flowed down her face, nor the anger in her eyes as she stared me down.

“What did you do to me?” she gasped through her tears.

“Me?” I fired back. Out of all the ways that I thought that this conversation was going to go, this was not one of the possible paths that I had predicted. “What do you mean me? You’re the one that ended up in my backyard, not vice versa.”

“And you’re the one that turned me into...” she snapped, her anger overcoming her sense of despair, “this... this thing!”

That made me pause.

The shock on my face must have been evident, because she paused as Michelle and I shared a look of incredulity. Was this young woman mentally ill? Was there something bigger going on here? Something so big that there was no way that I would be able to grasp the scope without sending myself into the bliss of madness?

Was this young woman really Twilight Sparkle?

I shook myself; that was not the line of thinking that I need to be continuing right now.

“Thing?” I asked, grasping at the first topic that came to mind.

“Yes, thing,” she said. The anger mixed with confusion on her face and she gestured wildly with her arm. “In fact, let’s start with that: What are you? I’ve never seen anything like you in any of my books.”

“Ooookay,” I drawled awkwardly, scratching the back of my head with the hand that I had been pointing at her with. “We things are called humans and we certainly didn’t do anything to you. Other than clothing you, putting you in our spare bed, and feeding you.” I chuckled in spite of the situation. “I believe that you put it best when you said “Always expect the best from your friends and never assume the worst,” in one of your letters to the Princess. You could at least extend the same courtesy to us. We haven’t done anything to you for you to label us as anything other than friends.”

She froze.

“How could you know that?” she asked, her face pale. “Only the princess could know what I put in that letter. I didn’t even dictate that to Spike.” At the mention of her assistant, she glared at me. “And what’s wrong with him, anyways?”

I ignored her scathing look and instead grabbed the universal remote from the table, using it to power on my media system. I set down the remote and picked up my mouse, navigating to iTunes, where I had every current episode of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic downloaded in glorious full-HD. I found the episode that I was looking for, Boast Busters, and clicked play.

“What’s this?” Not-Twilight asked as the screen lit up and began to load the episode. “And what’s ‘My Little Pony’?”

“This is how I know,” I replied, sitting down next to Michelle and Emma. I wrapped an arm around my fiance and scratched behind the ears of my dog. “Just watch.”

The three of us sat in total silence as the episode played. My mind reeled as I watched the emotions play across the young woman’s face.

At the point where Ursa Minor stomped into Ponyville, she had hidden her face behind her fist and shook violently. I immediately shut off the show and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, she was hyperventilating.

“Woah,” I said, trying to calm her down and looking to Michelle for help. She just gestured to the girl with the look on her face that told me to deal with my own mess. I didn’t bother trying to say anything more and simply sat with the girl and rocked her silently until her trembles wore off and she seemed to be okay.

“... Sorry,” she said, rubbing at one eye with a knuckle. “It’s been years since that night and I still have nightmares.”

I looked at her, not fully comprehending her fear. “I don’t understand, everything seemed to have worked out for you in the end.”

“I don’t know what that was,” she said, not looking at either of us. Her eyes were unfocused and distant. “But that wasn’t the whole story.”

I didn’t need to prompt her to continue.

“What you don’t know is that the Ursa Minor spent the better part of the night rampaging through Ponyville destroying several homes and nearly crushing several ponies.” She looked up at me, my arm still around her shoulder, and I could see the real pain that these memories were causing her. “When she roared, everypony could smell the stench. It was oppressive. It spoke of eons of eating ponies...”

She continued to detail the horrors of that night and the days following: The rebuilding of Ponyville, the removal of the Ursa from its cave by a team of specialists, the increase in guard presence, and the increased unsease of the close proximity of the Everfree Forest.

My mind, however, was stuck on one thing:

This really was, no doubts whatsoever, Twilight Sparkle.

Author's Note:

Also, give me y'all's thought's on 'The Hobbit.'

Both the movie and the book.