Twilight’s Safe Zone
“Twilight Sparkle! Where are you, young lady? You are in a heap of trouble!” Twilight Velvet called out as she searched her house, having checked the likeliest hiding places and now checking the improbable ones. Another vase had been broken, and while her magical-prodigy daughter would fix it eventually, if a tad too creatively, it was the principle of the thing, indeed, almost a universal law. Child breaks vase, parent chastises child, even when the vase had been a gift from Great Aunt Ostentia which would have been mathomed into the attic in a year or so.
Twilight Sparkle was nowhere to be found, but Velvet had been through this before and wasn’t unduly worried. When she found herself reduced to opening small jars and peering into the heating vents, it was usually time to go make another pot of tea and just wait things out. Her little Sparkle had found some very effective way to hide from her family, but always reappeared in time for dinner. Making a batch of cookies had been known to improve the response time.
In due course, the errant prodigy was rediscovered, levitating some tea biscuits from under the coffee table. She was admonished over the broken vase with a suitably arch expression on Velvet's face and acceptably mock-regretful ones on the child's. The vase was restored in a flash of purple light and life continued as usual, though Velvet would not learn the true secret of her daughter's disappearances for quite a long time.
All the time her mother had been calling her, and on many other occasions, Twilight Sparkle was smug, snug, and secure in her own private world. Ever since that one day in Magic Kindergarten where she’d made such a mess and the noodles had gotten everywhere and everyone had laughed at her, she’d felt an odd feeling when she teleported, as if there were an alternate destination available. One day, after many tries, she followed it and found herself tumbling into a place she later called the Safe Zone, a name she’d read once on a school pamphlet.
It was a roughly cylindrical room, sometimes with stony grey walls, sometimes with soft padded walls of dark tan, but the floor was always a thick layer of warm felt that was nice to snuggle into. The ceiling appeared visually as a source of soft blurry light, and to her magical sense as a series of folds beyond her ability to unravel. She probed the area thoroughly for hidden traps and dormant monsters as recommended in her O&O manual, and verified that she could easily come and go as she pleased, then brought in parts of her comic book collection and toys, bit by bit, until she had claimed the space as hers, a cozy refuge from angry parents and embarrassing social situations.
As she grew, she returned to the problem of the odd ceiling and walls with little success, until one day one of her instructors mentioned a theory of pocket dimensions that had been left behind as the world was forming. Under this theory, the reason she couldn’t teleport beyond the walls or ceiling in the local space was simply that there was nowhere else to teleport to, locally, within that tiny dimension; it converged to a constricted matrix at the perimeter, with all the transport vectors involuted. Since all the available evidence supported this conclusion, Twilight shelved the problem. And over the years, the comic books were supplanted by notes and tomes, and the Safe Zone became a study area, unknown even to Spike, where Twilight could study intensely, free from interruption.
One day, Princess Twilight Sparkle was napping in the Safe Zone, and dreamed that she was being gently scratched between her ears. She smiled in her sleep and snuggled into the feeling.
"Oh, Mac, AJ, that's it, right there..." she murmured, but the scratching grew more insistent and annoying, rubbing between her wings and snagging the feathers. She was just starting to waken when she was entangled in a huge white stringy mass, and hauled, squealing and struggling, up through the mysterious ceiling and into bright blinding light! She struggled, straining at the white strands that enveloped her and bound her...
“Twilight?” said Discord, squinting at the empurpled end of his cotton swab, then manifesting a magnifying glass to inspect it closely, his gargantuan bloodshot and moonshot eye staring down at her in curious consternation.
“Discord!?” she shouted, flapping her legs and trying to run with her wings. “Where am I? What are you doing!?” She looked wildly around her, seeing everywhere the non-Euclidian tesselated walls of Discord's Bathroom of Chaos! The vanity mirror was just an oil painting of Discord making a duck face, the bathtub was not only large enough to float a battleship but was engaged in doing so, and the toilet paper roll had no visible end and was placed on the spindle in both orientations at once!
“To answer your last question first,” he smirked, “I was cleaning my navel. I do it once every fifteen thousand, seven-hundred and eighty-two years.”
“You mean–” Revulsion wrinkled her snout. “My Safe Zone is in your navel? I was sleeping in your belly-button lint all this time?”
“Well, at various times,” he mused. “Your teleports must have intersected my worldline at discontinuous and even nonconsecutive intervals.”
“No… Wait.” Twilight was panicking, breathing with wheezy little whinnies as her tail wavered like a windsock in August. “There's something I don't understand. You’re the physical manifestation and personification of entropy. You are an emergent property of the universal trend towards thaumic self-consistency!”
Discord sighed, rolled his eyes and gave a curt, grudging nod.
“You were never even born in any meaningful sense! So why do you even have a navel?!”
He snorted like a dyspeptic bull. “Don’t be so omphaloskeptic. Trust me, you’d prefer not to know.”
“I do want to know!” she shouted. “Tell me!”
“Very well. It’s there so Celestia can park her chewing gum–”
Twilight’s horn blazed, and an instant later, there was an orange where Discord had stood.
A navel orange.