The good of the many

by Dafaddah

Chapter 6: Parallels

Still having over an hour before the lunch meeting, Princess Luna decided to take a walk to the Ministry of Science and visit Sunset Hoofing at work. The Hall of Science was a short walk from the Royal Castle, and despite the name the building seemed to be even older than the Castle itself. It had an impressive façade of brown sandstone that would not have looked out of place in the year of her banishment!

She entered the ornate main door, which was decorated in miniature stone sculptures of ponies engaged in scientific pursuits. The door led into a large entrance hall, with a huge elaborate stairway rising three stories above the ground floor. She enquired at the reception desk the location of Minister Hoofing's office. A somewhat overawed young unicorn mare gave her directions and a visitor badge to wear with her name on it, as if anypony might not know who she was!

"We thank thee," said the princess frostily, receiving a wide-eyed but generally correct bow in return.

There were quite a number of ponies engaged in various activities in the rooms along the way, and Luna indulged her curiosity by often taking a longer look at some of the more interesting goings-on. Before long she began to have an odd feeling, that something was not quite right nearby. The feeling was familiar somehow, so she followed it like a beacon in order to detemine its source.

It led Luna to a room where she spied a young grey unicorn mare with a long frizzy black mane with green tips, apparently asleep next to a table covered in complex looking equipment. She noted with interest the snoring unicorn's cutie mark: a blue and green ball caped in white at both ends, obviously a planet. The mare twitched in the midst of a dream. Having just discussed eavesdropping on dreams with Celestia, and seeing no-one else in the room, the princess decided to look into this pony's sleep.

She concentrated to connect her perception to the inner vision of the grey mare, and was startled to see the mare get up and slowly open her eyes, even though Luna felt that she was most definitely still dreaming! Afraid that she might be caught in her observations, she quickly made herself invisible.

The princess noticed something else that was far more ominous: she was still seeing the mare's dream at the same time, even though she was obviously ambulating and appeared awake. With a sinking feeling, Luna realized what was happening - a dream resonance. This meant that the universe of Equestria was experiencing a significant proximity in space-time with another universe. And everypony in both universes were in mortal danger should the two actually ever touch!

***

Glowball was pretty sure she was dreaming. She was in the strangest place she could ever have imagined, walking along a tunnel containing a huge metal pipe, with strange blockish structures every so often. The tunnel stretched both before and behind her as far as she could see, yet she could detect a slight curve to both directions, as if the tunnel described a huge circle. Finally, she turned from the pipe, went to a door in the tunnel wall and climbed up several flights of stairs, finally arriving in a large room filled with equipment and furniture... and monsters... in lab coats.

Glowball periodically enjoyed having so called 'lucid dreams' in which she could do impossible things, so rather than gallop off screaming, she decided to go with the flow and check out these creatures. She approached a desk where several of them clustered together, looking at a strange picture frame. Looking at the object of their attention, she saw the images within it moving and writhing, with a jumble of text and numbers. One of the creatures, likely male as it had a beard on its otherwise mostly hairless face, turned to her and exclaimed: "Dr. Conner, you've got to take a look at these readings. We're seeing traces of all sorts of particles seemingly coming from nowhere! The must be a glitch in the detectors, or some form of interference or contamination of the beam."

Glowball was taken aback, but since the game plan was to play along, and since these creatures were wearing the traditional garb of scientists, perhaps it would be best to respond as a scientist would to another. (And frankly, she was a scientist herself even if she was not exactly brilliant at handling social contact with ponies... and monsters... of other professions. Lucky her, this was one game she knew how to play!)

"What makes you say that..." she noticed a tag with his picture and a name on it, "...Peter?" said Glowball.

"Well," began Peter, "the traces just seem to be starting from nothing, and they involve all sorts of particles in combinations that don't match up. Also, the vectors don't make sense, it's as if collisions are happening from all directions randomly, and are being affected by masses that shouldn't be there! I really think the detectors have a problem, or the datafeeds from the instruments must be compromised."

While Peter was explaining his earlier pronouncements, Glowball made three quick observations:
One - Peter had mentioned particles. Did he mean particles of matter? Was this installation some huge machine for investigating the nature of atoms?
Two - Looking down she saw a similar tag to Peter's with the words 'Laura Conner'. That must be her name in this dream. She had better remember it!
Three - Looking down beyond the name tag she discovered exactly the same type of body as had all the other creatures in the room. How exiting! In this dream she herself was a monster!

***

Dr. Laura Conner felt a bit groggy having almost fallen asleep while waiting for a status check on the cryogenics for a set of magnets... and noticed that she wasn't in a familiar place. She thought she knew every nook and cranny of the accelerator installations at CERN, but she had somehow wandered into a heretofore unseen area. Given the size of the place, that wasn't unheard of, just unlikely.

She looked around. She was in some lab. Judging from the flasks containing various liquids, complex glass apparatuses connected with tubing, an old model optical microscope with an open notebook next to it, there was some chemical procedure going on. It reminded her more of lab work done during her undergraduate days than anything she expected to see at CERN. 'This is odd', she thought, 'who would be doing this type of work near the accelerator ring?'

Laura decided to exit the room and see if she could get her bearings. She needed to get back to work on tracing the source of this morning's anomalies, or the whole day's data might be rendered useless. She left through the only door in the room and froze in her tracks as she entered the corridor and saw the weirdest scene imaginable: everywhere she looked, pastel colored ponies where circulating in and out of similar doors. Some ponies had single horns, some wings, and still others had neither horn nor wings, and some of all three types were wearing lab coats, security glasses, and even hard hats. She also noticed most of the ponies were not wearing any other clothes under the lab coats.

Several ponies standing - and conversing! - near what were obviously a water cooler and a hot drinks dispenser turned to her, one of them raised a foreleg, waved a hoof at her and spoke up. "Hey Glowball, have you figured out what was affecting half of all the experiments going on this morning? Nopony is getting any useful work done, and the old mare has been riding everypony for results ever since she got her voice back!"

Laura was proud of the way she always was able to keep her cool when experiments went haywire and colleagues began to panic. This trait in no small part contributed to her quick rise in her profession and ultimately her position at CERN. Her agile mind quickly came to three immediate conclusions.

One - She was in some scientific establishment, only the scientists were small horses or ponies instead of people.
Two - Somehow she was being mistaken for someone called 'Global' or some such name.
Three- The pony scientists' activities this morning also seemed to be beset by gremlins.

Maybe she was dreaming and this whole hallucination was just a manifestation of her subconscious mind working out the problems she faced in the real world. Dreaming or not, she found a few things about her current situation somewhat curious, such as 'why were these ponies so willing to accept her substitution of this 'Global' person?', and 'was the source of their parallel problems the same?'. "Parallel!" she blurted out loud. The word was making bells ring in her head.

"Hey Glowball, what was that? 'Parallel' did you say? What or whom is parallel, and in relation to what or who?" said a teal colored pony with a light blue mane, interrupting her thoughts.

Laura approached the group and saw that these ponies also had ID badges. The card of the pony asking the question read "Rock Candy", and the card of the pale lavender one that had waved to her earlier identified her as "Time Crescent", with a subtext below "Chief Librarian".

The lack of clothing made it abundantly clear which ponies were male or female. She had a sudden horrible thought! Looking down at herself she saw a grey colored chest, on each side dangled tresses of thick frizzy black hair tipped in greenish blue, and below that grey forelegs ending equally grey hooves. She had an ID tag reading "Glowball" on the lab coat lapel AND SHE WAS NAKED UNDER THE LAB COAT!

Feeling the heat of embarrassment rise, she thought how typical it was that this was also a 'naked' dream, along with all the rest. Her subconscious was really working overtime on this one! What a nightmare! Then she couldn't help but snort as she concluded mentally 'And I am the mare.'

"Yo, Glowball, are you ignoring me or are you just gonna stand there reading our name tags all day? And what's so funny about them?" the pony called Rock complained.

"Sorry, Rock Candy, I was just thinking out loud," answered Laura. Feeling a researcher's need for more information, she decided to see if she could spur on (she snorted again) the so far quite loquacious colt. "What types of effects are being reported now?"

"Jeez, pretty much everything is going haywire. Chemistry reports all sorts of impurities suddenly popping up in processes that have been running clean for days or even weeks before. Physics reports strange traces in cloud chamber experiments, And Magic reports that spell casting is resulting in almost random errors, if spells produce anything at all." He sighed. "You know, it'd be easier to show you than describe it all. Howabout we just do a quick tour of the departments. That way when the old mare comes for answers we'll at least be able to give a coherent report, even if we can't explain why this is happening."

"Sounds like a plan I would come up with!" replied Laura with a smirk. She loved it when people, or ponies, behaved according to plan. "Lead on Rock".

"Ahem!" said a voice behind her, and Laura turned to see Time Crescent looking at her as if she were slightly offended. "I hope this does not mean you'll be late from work tonight. We have a reservation to go out to 'Chez Squeezy' tonight, dear." she added looking more concerned than off-put.

"Hey, that's right, isn't today your three year anniversary, you two?" said Rock. He turned to Time Crescent and said quietly so only the three of them could hear: "You know she's been talking about that fancied-up, overpriced greasy hay-bale all week. Don't you worry none. I'll make sure she leaves the office on time." He turned back to Laura, who hoped she wasn't showing on her pony face how nonplussed she was inside, spoke to the pale blue mare "See you later... dear." This seemed to satisfy Time Crescent, who cantered off on her own business. 'Too many parallels!' thought Laura, and then 'This is getting more weird by the minute.' Aloud she said "Let's go Rock, and thanks for the save."

"No prob. A friend in need and all that. And boy, did you need a friend just then! But don't worry about being in my debt. I'll come to exact my payment when I can think of a sufficiently big favor. I'm not in any rush," smirked the pony.

Laura decided to change her opinion of this dreamworld - it was JUST LIKE the real world, only with more legs. And speaking of legs... "OK, Rock, let's go." and she followed him to their first meeting.

***

Luna had seen enough. She disengaged from Glowball's dream, and hurried onwards to find Minister Hoofing's office. Arriving at the door, she saw it was open, and inside was a pony sitting at a desk, with yet another door leading further inwards. The young colt was obviously Sunset's secretary, and by now he had had time enough to see that one of the co-rulers of Equestria was visiting unannounced.

He stumbled in his haste to get up and bow to the princess at the same time. "P-Princess Luna" he stammered, "I will advise the Minister of your arrival immediately!"

"Please do. Tell her this is somewhat of an emergency as well," she replied, waving a hoof so he would get to it without delay.

As he was still clumsily getting out from behind the desk, the door to Hoofing's office opened of its own accord, and Minister Hoofing emerged looking serious. "Your highness!" she bowed. "Would I be wrong in suspecting that your majesty's visit may be related to the difficulties this ministry has been experiencing these past few hours?"

"Excellent deduction, Minister Hoofing," replied Luna. "It is in fact in this regard that I wish to ask a favor of you."

"Your wish is my command, Princess," answered Sunset. Luna could swear she saw the old mare wink with the eye hidden from her secretary by her profile.

"Well, um, very good." Luna found it hard to believe Sunset could find time for humor under these circumstances. She was a most surprising and interesting character! "There is a mare working in this ministry, Glowball is her name I believe. Could you please post someone to keep an eye on her movements, and this with the utmost discretion? It is of vital importance she continue undeterred in those activities in which she is currently engaged. Please ensure also that I receive a report on her actions every thirty minutes at the castle."

Hoofing looked to her secretary. "Angel Cake, please dispatch a proctor and two non-uniformed security to enact the surveillance and report to the Princess in the Castle every half hour."

"Yes, Minister. Right away!" replied Angel Cake.

"Oh, and Angel, please make sure nopony else knows about this. Is this clear?"

"Yes, Minister!" assured the young colt, who immediately left the office.

"Shall we go back to the castle now?" asked Sunset. "It is almost time for our lunch meeting."

"A good idea, Sunset," Luna replied casually, as they were now alone in the office. "Oh, and, Angel Cake is it?" she asked raising an eyebrow.

Sunset chuckled as she and the Princess exited her office. "Rank doth hath its privileges, Princess!"

'A surprising old mare, indeed!' thought Luna, as they walked back to the Castle to meet with Celestia and her guests.

Comments

[Mythee]

LARGE HADRON COLLIDER FTW SCIENCE! T'was an honor to be cameo'd in this ultimate win. @u@ *writes fanfic about how much I'm spazzing over this fanfic*

[Mythee]

Also, this was just a very interesting chapter. A lot of meaty content to savor, cameos or not. And Luna being competent. That is très cool.

[Dafaddah]

A quick update on TGOTM (too lazy to type the entire name although this parenthesis is way longer then the actual title would have been... meh...).

Sorry it's taking me so long for the next chapter. I hope to be able to finish it by tomorrow. Sorry!

BUT - more foreshadowing - you'll get to find out THE DETAILS OF THE MORTAL PERIL OF TWO UNIVERSES!

And more Spike.

Dafaddah

[BenRG]

CERN? As in the home of the Large Hadron Collider - the device that could hypothetically upset the subatomic balance of the universe? O...kay. I think I know what might be the problem now.