Chapter 9 - You know that I'm falling...and I don't know what to say
Celestia hadn’t thought that she’d find herself in a home built into a tree, but then the last few months had found Celestia in many places she never entertained the existence of.
Zecora’s home was, indeed, built inside a tree, or rather seemed to have been shaped from three trees, all originally planted close enough together that with time and patience, allowed the mystic to form a suitable home, once one plugged inevitable holes with the appropriate ancient building techniques and materials. It was well ventilated, too, enough so that her host had needed time for her and Applebloom to make some preparations to make it so it could contain the smoke from the fires they were about to light without suffocating them. The two took the nearly unresponsive Sunset into Zecora’s home to prepare her for the coming ritual while Celestia was instructed to run an errand.
“Go to your home and gather items three of great import. One of destiny, one of the bonds of love, and one of last resort.” Exactly what that was supposed to mean, Zecora wasn’t saying, only that, “Your heart is wiser than your head, don’t think too deeply on what was said.”
For all that Celestia was skeptical, the hermit had been right. And it turned out she already had two of the items with her, it was the third that almost escaped her, as it was normally kept so out of sight it didn’t even have a physical presence unless called upon, accidentally or not.
Her sword, the one that had somehow created itself during her Hearth’s Warming jaunt through the multiverse, was certainly an item of destiny. It managed to get around all attempts to keep it magically or technologically contained, and always found its way into her hand…even when she absolutely did not need a weapon.
Sunset’s phone was the item for ‘the bonds of love,’ as trite as that sounded. She was somewhat concerned that the items had to be magical, but then Zecora hadn’t said anything about magic, did she?
Finally, there was the journal. Shortly after the portal had been opened out of cycle by Princess Twilight, some of the mages from Equestria had rigged a much more stable system that didn’t rely on a small-ish, easily stolen or destroyed book. Once the portal had been rigged into a gate system that could be opened, closed, and secured on-demand, the journal had been returned to Celestia for safekeeping, ostensibly until Sunset felt up to using it again (and was capable of doing so), but the girl hadn’t so much as given it a second glance when Celestia had offered to return it to her, just shaking her head and replying, “no” with her phone.
Sunset lay in the corner of the small home on a straw mat covered in a sheet. A blushing Applebloom gathered the pile of Sunset’s clothes from where they had been discarded. In response to Celestia’s arched eyebrow, she muttered, “Zecora said that this ritual had t’be done nekkid. You gotta lose yer clothes, too, but…well…I reckin’ you can do that and bathe yerself.”
As Celestia’s other eyebrow went up, Zecora entered the room as well just as Applebloom was exiting with the clothes. She held a basin in one hand and what appeared to be a simple, unbleached cotton cloth in the other.
Celestia looked to Sunset, then back to Zecora’s hands, before scowling at the woman, “…really?” was all she could think to say.
Her answer was an enigmatic smile and an outstretched hand offering the cloth.
One cold and slightly embarrassing sponge bath later, Zecora draped a sheet over Celestia before calling in Applebloom to finish helping with the start of the ritual. The healer added a log to the fire burning in the pit in the middle of the large main room of the house before stoking it, then she scattered a handful of what appeared to be crushed leaves and powders into the flames. Nodding, she ushered Applebloom out. Celestia could hear, somewhat distractedly, Zecora’s quiet direction to return to the Apple home and let the rest of the family know where their guests were so nobody panicked upon return from the hospital.
Celestia shifted a bit as the other woman moved quietly about the room, gathering further ingredients into a handful of bowls that were sitting on a shelf near the door. Zecora put the bowls and a kettle on a tray, then moved them over the fire, setting them down near the three items Celestia brought, then the other woman sat on the floor next to the mat Celestia was laying on. She put the kettle over the fire and simply stared into the flickering flames. Having nothing better to do, Celestia did the same.
“Quiet your mind must be, still and calm like a mountain lake; if into your daughter’s magical prison, this journey you should take.” said the healer after a pause.
Celestia snorted, “I know the drill, I’ve been part of a few ‘prayer circles’ in my more wild days in college…and that was a tortured rhyme.”
Zecora turned to face her guest, a smirk on her face. “Rhyming is the art of mindful speech…but every so often…” she nodded her head in amusement, “...one must reach.”
With this, Zecora rose to her feet and gathered the book, the phone, and the sword and laid them in a line between Celestia and Sunset. So doing, she paused, returned to the fire, and collected the kettle. She poured the now hot water into a bowl and returned the kettle to the fire and herself to a seated position. After a moment, a colored smoke started to rise from the fire. It was multi-hued, looking a bit like a shimmering rainbow for a moment if a rainbow could be made of pastels and sparkles, then turned to ash before turning green. As it continued to shift in coloration, Zecora nodded sagely and picked up the bowl, sipping the brew that Celestia realized was a tea of some sort.
To her amusement, the healer’s face flinched, a blanch like someone had punched her with a lemon. A string of sibilant words in a tongue that Celestia didn’t know flowed from the other woman's lips. “Good that need of this brew is rare, its flavor is that of a horse’s derriere.”
Celestia giggled, and on the inhale breathed in what felt like heavy air. She gasped, her lungs heaving in, only to have the flavor of woodsmoke roll down her tongue. She at once became suddenly hyper-focused and completely relaxed. The hacking cough that would normally have happened seemed to be stilled by a slight aftertaste of cotton candy. She felt as though the room would tilt off its axis if she so much as blinked, but then the thought was chased away as she saw Zecora stand, seemingly watching nothing. More of the musical language filled the air, and Celestia recognized that she was probably inhaling smoke from some sort of herbal substance that was acting as a psychedelic. If it will help Sunset, the only coherent thought came, I’ll get so wasted I’ll fail every drug screening for the rest of my life! It was such an odd thought that was so counter to her normal demeanor that she giggled again.
Zecora turned to Celestia, “Breath in deeply, you must, and in the herbs and smoke place your trust.”
The healer knelt down between her and Sunset’s feet, nearly straddling the sword’s tip. The smoke was heavy in the air now, waves of shimmering pastel and oscillating color filling the room. Zecora cupped a hand over Celestia’s face, stretching her long limbs to do so. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the healer’s other hand hovering over Sunset’s mouth as well, before she moved her hands in a scooping motion. Trails of colorful smoke seemed to drift through the air, almost like a streamer from Celestia and Sunset’s mouth to Zecora’s hands. The other woman began undulating her arms, making cris-crossing motions with her palms, pulling the glittering streamers through the air. Barely moving her head, Celestia turned enough to see the two ribbons of smoky glitter twining together over her and Sunset’s belongings, before a point on the rope-like trail dipped down over the phone.
Zecora nodded and reached down to pull Celestia’s hand out from under the sheet that was covering her, then did the same to Sunset. She first placed Sunset’s hand palm down on the phone, then did the same to Celestia’s over the back of Sunset’s hand. Almost instinctively, Celestia curled her hand around her daughter’s and stepped through the mirror portal.
She was at first horrified by the change in her body; going from quadrupedal to bipedal would indeed be quite a shock, but not nearly as much as losing her magic. It turned out the best opportunity to have made the transition was at night, as trial and error had proven what the morning’s sun would reveal readily, these strange beings walked upright and wore clothes pretty much everywhere and her attempts to walk on all fours were comical, at best. Recognizing that the dark of night was not a good time to go exploring a foreign world, she found a storage shed behind the building near the portal (which was in the base of a statue on this side…odd, but not terrifically so. Better than a fragile mirror, at any rate.)
At least the language was the same, even if they did use odd words like, “computer,” and “Internet.”
She realized within a few minutes of conversation that the building she was outside of when she arrived in this world was a school. And, unfortunately, she appeared to have de-aged to be mistaken for one of the youths that needed to attend, as the dark-skinned woman who found her made clear after the horrible excuse for a timekeeping device of a bell nearly blew her ears off at the apparent start of the school day. Not wanting to show her hoof just yet, Celestia let the woman, apparently, the co-regent of the school named Luna, lead her to the administrative offices. Being one of the sharpest students at the School for Gifted Unicorns even before her mentor took her under her wing, she realized that she’d better find ways to play along fast.
Some very fast-talking (and a few gaffes, she’d have to learn the lingo and fast if she was going to pass as a native), and some minor lies (she really was “transferring” from her old school…they just weren’t likely to be able to forward any records for at least 30 moons) convinced the vice-principal to start a file on her and forgo any disciplinary measures. Celestia received her schedule, her locker (whatever that was) assignment, a combination lock (which she realized was designed to be used by the very deft “fingers” these creatures had, not pegasus wings, unicorn magic, or earth pony lips), and a packet of donated school supplies (given when they realized that Celestia was carrying ink and quill and rolls of parchment in her portal-transformed saddlebags-cum-backpack), and was just about to leave the office to find her way to her first class when she came in.
At first, Celestia was sure her mentor had somehow managed to get the portal open out of cycle and had come to this world herself to retrieve her. The woman, appearing to be just as tall, regal, and royal as Celestia expected, barely registered her presence with a distant smile and casual nod of acknowledgment before moving on. A request for some records to the apparent secretary (which Celestia now realized looked startlingly like Senescial Raven and was also named Raven) before going through another door to a private office allowed her to breathe more easily. The door even bore her mentor’s name on a placard, though the writing was the same stiff, almost formal, print she was seeing all over the place in this world. With a slightly shaky breath, she stepped out into the school.
Within two of the sessions (which were called “periods” in this school system), Celestia formed a more solid working theory than when she first stumbled through the portal; this world was almost a twisted mirror universe to Equestria; several of the teachers and students had very clear and obvious counterparts to the ponies (and even a few other races) from her home. While she’d never been friends with any of them, she did get to know a large number of ponies in her life, even if it was just to learn enough to get the better of them. She was able to easily use that understanding of their person and character to navigate this student body as well.
By the third night in the storage shed, which she’d learned was used for the P.E. equipment, she realized she’d have to find other accommodations, even if showering in the school locker rooms was a fantastic solution to the dreaded “teenaged body odor” problem. Some exploring led her to a pawn shop, which took the bits off her hands to exchange for the currency of this world. While she was 100% sure she was getting stiffed on the exchange, especially given the pawnbroker was treating the coins as little more than novelty gold rather than their actual value. A number of bits that would have supported a family of three in Equestria for three months wound up becoming little more than enough to buy some clothes, basic supplies, and a super-cheap phone with some prepaid time and data.
But it was enough to start.
From that foundation, she expanded. The school’s rumor mill led her to the abandoned warehouse, where she evicted some rodent tenants and set up an extension cord from the Chinese restaurant nearby. Running an entire home’s worth of electricity might have been noticed, but just enough power to charge her phone, laptop, and run a lamp? The restaurant probably burned more money to run the aging neon sign out front.
Celestia’s interactions with the principal were, thankfully, very few. She wasn’t sure she could remain detached or emotionally stable. There was just so much…baggage between that woman and her counterpart in Equestria. It wasn’t too long before the journal came out of her backpack and on a shelf in the warehouse. Its weight was just another reminder of the life she left behind, and she had enough of that every time the principal’s voice came on the P.A. system that she didn’t need it the rest of the day as well. It wasn’t too much longer before the journal was crammed in her locker, a place she rarely visited, and therefore would rarely see it.
Naturally, she excelled in every class. Her only real challenge was History, as this world clearly didn't develop at all as Equestria did, and sciences, which had no use of or reference to magic at all. The lack of a Discordian Era was surprising, as was the knowledge that the orbital mechanics were completely backward, but once she accounted for the differences it was fairly easy to master the modified subjects, and even begin mastery of Information Science and the technology of this world.
Time seemed to pass in a blur, though a few notable events happened. The first Fall Formal she became princess of was particularly special, reigniting her desires to claim her destiny. The staff seemed impressed that an obviously disadvantaged girl with apparently absentee parents should be able to pull off the win. The student body was impressed over her absolute control over the entire process, to the point that by the night of the dance it wasn’t even a matter of whether she would win, but by how much.
The first chance she had of doing so, she ducked back through the portal. She had no real idea what she expected, but discovering she had been replaced was…so very not it. Her return via the portal, once again at night, was one of stealth. Nobody knew she was there, which was good, since as soon as she found out that some upstart named Twilight Sparkle was hailed as the princess’s star pupil and a national hero for stopping Nightmare Moon she incinerated the newspaper she’d been reading from the archives. Dusty Pages would have been so disappointed to learn that Celestia had destroyed something from the library, but then the librarian wasn’t there to take her to task.
She had done more research, what little she could do on the pony who replaced her without leaving Canterlot. Sparkle had apparently recently relocated to a small town called Ponyville. (Celestia had to chuckle when she learned the name of the town. Before she spent time in the human world, it would have been an ordinary name for her. Now she could only imagine the humans doing some similar name, like “Man’s Field” for a farm or something similar.) Pictures were sparse, and facts were obfuscated by the “telephone game” (a human term she found rather appropriate) of newsponies relaying facts without having been there, but apparently, Sparkle had assembled a strike team of ponies with a variety of specialties to navigate the hazards of the Everfree Forest and the ancient castle where her former mentor had banished Nightmare Moon to recover the Element of Magic. As soon as Celestia saw the photo of the element, she knew it was what she needed to claim her destiny, but it would have to wait, she had to prepare. More determined than ever, she returned through the mirror end of the portal and began planning how she would return in two and a half years. The next day, she returned to the school with a purpose.
She encountered Flash Sentry, who was rather attractive as these humans went, and was gullible enough that he bought her sob story about never having her parents around and enough of a white knight he never really questioned when she needed help with even things that were simple or commonplace in this world. He seemed to think that there was more than just an acquaintance relationship between them, which worked out for her in that ‘boyfriends’ apparently had an increased social burden in terms of what was expected of them. This gave Celestia a measure of power she found she rather liked.
Other faces came and went, including an unusual group of friends. The pink one was obnoxious and hard to navigate, but easy enough to manipulate once you figured out that she was a chronic people-pleaser. The jock and the hick were also fairly easy. Hit them in their respective egos and they shattered. Fluttershy was the easiest of all of them, she just shrank and never pushed back, even when it would have been better to do so. She just made Celestia so angry and it was easy to take that anger out on the quiet girl.
Rarity stood out the most, being the only other student with anything close to her social network and charisma. The Spring Fling victory was extremely close, requiring her to hone her somewhat atrophied social skills enough to get close enough to the girl to find some dirt, anything, that could be used against her.
That the girl was attracted to other girls being at all taboo was such a foreign concept that Celestia almost missed it. It took a consultation with several other students to confirm that, for families like Rarity’s, it was, indeed, a pretty big secret. It surprised Celestia to discover that she almost felt bad about exposing the secret, knowing it would cause a rift between a girl so similar to herself and her parents…but in the end, she was just another girl, and Celestia had a destiny to claim, so she crushed Rarity’s hopes for the crown. It was almost comical, seeing the otherwise so well put-together girl coming apart at the seams, but in the end, it had been worth it…surely…
It was shortly after this that Flash cut off what had been a relationship between them. Celestia wasn’t really upset with the breakup, what bothered her was that he had initiated the split.
When it came time for the portal to open again, Celestia's preparations were complete. 72 hours was not much time, and the specially crafted spell she had prepared was entirely theoretical. It was based somewhat on the human concept of Radar and radiation scanning. As soon as she stepped through the mirror, she tested her spell…and it worked! She was the greatest genius to come out of her mentor’s school, after all…at least until Twilight came along. The thought of her replacement sobered her considerably, and she followed the “ping” back through the crystalline halls she found herself in. At first, she thought she was back at the castle in Canterlot, but she didn’t recognize the armor of the guards and the few glimpses she caught of the city and surrounding landscape belied that notion. Amusingly, her theory of the two worlds being mirrors was confirmed by the sight of a pegasus version of Flash Sentry on patrol through the castle. Ignoring the unusual local for the mirror to be moved to and her lack of knowledge, she made her way to what was apparently a wing for guest suites and found the crown…right next to the alicorn Twilight Sparkle. Sure, she takes my place with…her, takes my title at the school, takes my place in the history books…why not take my destiny, too?!
The snatch-and-grab was almost perfectly executed…but for a damned dragon’s tail. It didn’t matter in the end, she made it back through the portal, thankfully managing to avoid encountering any substantive response to Princess Twilight’s alarm. Everything was fine…until she crossed through to the other side of the portal and the crown was gone.
Some questioning of her contacts revealed that Fluttershy had picked it up when it bounced through the portal, and the first thing in Celestia’s plan went wrong when she realized that volunteering for the committee responsible for the Fall Formal decorations so she could make the crown a duplicate of the Element of Magic backfired on her rather severely; nobody recognized the thing as anything more than a prop for the upcoming dance.
Encountering Princess Twilight had been unexpected, but she was confident that the other transplanted pony wouldn’t be able to make any further problems for her…but then she did. She began by unifying the group of five that included the target of her bullying, the two who could network as well as she could, the jock who practically ran all the school’s teams, and the one person in the school that everyone (including the staff) trusted without question. Then gained the ear of Flash, which was just rubbing salt in the wound, really. Faced with a suddenly shrinking time window and an actual potential threat to the success of her plan, she attempted a “Hail Bitters” move that was childish, but simple; she trashed the gym and all its decorations and framed Twilight for it. If she could get the unicorn-turned-girl out of the way even for a few hours…but such was not to be, not only did Flash uncover her deception (admittedly not the best-executed plan she’d ever had, but she was suffering from severe time and resource constraints, and delegating the photo-doctoring to Snips and Snails really wasn’t a good idea at all) but the princess and her friends managed to put the gym back together in record time…and pulled even more support from the student body. She didn’t even bother with her formal dress because she already knew she wouldn’t be winning against Twilight.
So finally, she enacted her final gambit, a roll of the dice that had so little chance of working it would have been a small miracle…and in the end, the princess had called her bluff. Twilight had won, Celestia lost…and it hurt. It hurt in ways she couldn’t explain, and then when her friends began trash-talking and crowing over their victory, the pain turned to anger…and she acted without thinking. The fight would have been comical if the stakes hadn’t been so high. Equestria’s superweapon and Celestia’s destiny hung in the balance, and when she got her hands on the crown, she knew who had won. She put it on, anticipating, no, relishing the magical thrum she felt from it, using the skill that was so ingrained in magic students that it was more habit than action, she opened her mana channels and let the power of the Element of Magic, the most powerful magical item in two worlds, flow through her…
…and it burned! The pain, the anger, the fury, and loathing that she’d grown up suppressing blasted to the surface of her consciousness like a fountaining volcano. The thin facade of the genius filly-turned-girl shattered, and with it, her body transformed. She grew, stretched tall, taller than the principal! Her skin turned red and her back sprouted wings. A tail tearing itself through her clothes was almost an afterthought to the feeling of her legs lengthening and her hands turning into claws. She felt the power flowing from the crown and through her and looked down on the frightened students of the school…her traitorous subjects…and concocted a plan that was brilliant even if hastily cobbled together. She’d enslave them, then take them through the portal. If Flash had a doppelganger who was on the guard, then it was likely that many of the other students had similar mirror versions in Equestria, and very possibly ponies in positions of power, or close to it. Even if there was only half the duplication, she’d have more than enough to run a shadow campaign against the throne while she consolidated her power. She just needed to get them through the portal and out of the city, which meant she needed additional power by her side. A spell on the students and on her two hench…boys (they weren’t men, certainly), and she was ready to move…but then Twilight stood in her way.
And she looked at the girl who had taken everything from her. Saw the loyalty she inspired, the generosity she had shown even when her own people and nation were at risk, the kindness she had extended even when it didn’t serve any greater purpose, the honesty in the face of ridicule or disbelief, the joy she brought her friends without expecting anything in return. She didn’t see a former unicorn, or a princess, she saw a thief. The rage that filled her boiled out into a fireball, which she fully intended to eliminate the being that had so completely nullified her purpose, her destiny.
Made her worthless.
Made her nothing.
Celestia was not nothing.
And then something happened that the most brilliant student to ever come from the School for Gifted Unicorns, both of them, had never anticipated.
The girls who Twilight befriended claimed their magic.
Within moments, they had once again rallied victory from an absolute certain defeat. Rising like a phoenix from the fireball that was supposed to burn Twilight to ashes, the six girls summoned the Rainbow of Light. It shouldn’t have been possible, they were missing the other five elements, which presumably were back in Equestria. This wasn’t the strike team Twilight had formed three years prior, it was a handful of everyday girls that she’d pulled together as friends…and they somehow were wielding the might of power so legendary its number of uses could be counted on hooves even though it had existed for at least a millennium.
The moment the chromatic weapon enveloped her, she was suddenly aware of standing in the middle of a circle of light. At six points around the circle shown entities of pure magic
They were speaking to her, but not with words. The concepts she was being confronted with only barely distracted her from the fact that she stood before them as a human, not a pony. “What?! What are you trying to say? I’m supposed to be your princess, your champion, why are you fighting against me?” she shouted at the cacophony of pure thought that was assailing her.
All at once the clamor silenced, and five of them seemed to fade…no, not fade, but still, and in their stillness, their brilliance diminished. Now that they were no longer storms of color, she could see they were more like incredibly complex multi-dimensional circuits, paths of light that seemed so dense as to form crystalline structures, but there was nothing particularly solid to them. The one that remained active rose above the others as if stepping up to a podium, if a concept given the form of light could even perform such an action.
“Sunset Shimmer, you have abused the power of the manifestation of Friendship|Magic,” it recited, the two words of Friendship and Magic somehow being spoken at the same time, as if meaning the same thing, “You have ignored the lessons laid at your feet and reached for a gift that you are not prepared for.”
She tried to rally a defense, surely she would be permitted a chance to acquit herself before whatever these beings were. “I only sought to claim what was mine by destiny!” she retorted, “So many people…so many ponies sought to block me from becoming what I’m meant to be!”
She was now seeing dominant coloration and even patterns in the entities she faced. The one that had been addressing her was lavender and held a shape that was vaguely like a star. She sensed some activity behind her and turned to see the other purple entity begin to take form and grow active. It rose, not as high as the star but above the other. “You failed to grasp that it was the very people you stepped over that were your keys to your destiny. Time and again you had the chance to take the path to the ascension you crave, but each time you cast it aside.” Having spoken its piece, it lowered to the same level as the others and stilled.
“No…no! How can any of these people have been a part of my destiny!?” Celestia cried, “I’m meant to be a princess, an alicorn!” Now snarling, she turned back to face the chair-entity of this apparent counsel. “How can any being lower than me be a part of that destiny?!”
“As you have yet to learn the lesson needed to even begin to comprehend the question you have asked, let alone the answer, you will be placed under a geas. You will be required to uphold the values of Harmony and Friendship. Once you have shown that you have fully understood the Magic of Friendship, the geas will be lifted. You must be honest,” the red-colored entity seemed to spin to activity and rise to the same level as the star, “Generous,” the diamond rose up, “Full of joy,” the pink…blob rose, practically a micro-hurricane compared to the others, “Kind,” the other pink shape, this one seeming to be composed of four lobes, more gently spun up and joined the others, “and loyal,” the final entity looked like nothing more than a red streak, but seemed to spin its entire self vertically rather than horizontally like the rest, “Before you will be released to practice the agency that you have so abused.”
Celestia scowled at the entities, “You’re going to punish me for pursuing what’s mine by right?!” she began shouting, “I’ve outwitted every challenger, I out-maneuvered an immortal princess! With barely anything, I went from an outcast to the doorstep of Equestria with an army! You think a bunch of lights can stop me?!”
“SILENCE!” thundered the six entities in unison. “Your hubris will endanger yourself and others,” the star began, “Has endangered two worlds! And you speak your words without a thought to the consequences. To ensure you are unable to manipulate others with the truth, you are prohibited from revealing that you are geassed or the nature thereof.”
The lights started fading, but somehow her awareness of the entities had not. It was like she could sense them closing in, pressing against her spirit and mind like a mold. “You think just keeping me from talking about something directly can stop me?! You will not beat me, nobody beats me!!! I will find a way!”
Before she could speak another word, visions, images, feelings, experiences started flashing over her consciousness. An awareness of her misdeeds, of the ways she had injured another in any way, whether the immature reactions of a filly or the calculating schemes of a young woman, started slamming into her being. She was being forced to live every pain and torment she’d visited upon anyone else, starting with her mentor and culminating with attempting to kill Twilight Sparkle. It didn’t matter to the entities how justified Celestia thought the actions were, if they were counter to the will of the Elements, she was forced to endure the pain and suffering she’d inflicted.
It was only with a dim awareness that she realized she was falling through the air, by the time she was jarred back into full cognizance by a twenty-foot fall to the bottom of a crater, the agony she experienced from what she had done to others was far worse than the pain of the impact. And worse, was the voice. Not of the six entities that seemed to represent the elements, but her own voice, the one tucked into the back of her mind, the one that was fully aware of how much she was hurting others and how drastically she was falling from the principles of Harmony. It had always been there, she had simply trained herself to ignore it.
The Elements had magnified that voice, giving it center stage to show her that not only did she know better, she made the choice to turn a blind eye to Friendship.
There had been another way…and she’d ignored it.
She knew how it would look; the “bad girl” of the school, suddenly contrite and ready to learn about friendship with eyes full of tears. She looked back at the sum total of her life and realized that she had destroyed it more certainly than Twilight or her old mentor ever could. She was nowhere, had nothing, had nobody, and there was nobody to blame but herself.
And it hurt. I hurt far worse than any punishment could.
As she watched the aftermath, accepted the complete and total loss to the girl she had put on the pedestal of “Nemesis,” she felt a small flicker of hope. The princess had…well, not quite given a royal decree, but she had tasked the five girls she had befriended with teaching Celestia the lessons she’d ignored all her life.
Banishment was fitting, and she didn’t even ask Twilight about returning; what would the point be? She’d have to go back to face her mentor, likely face treason and sedition charges, not to mention theft of a magical artifact, and if the princesses were feeling particularly vindictive, they could potentially try her for war crimes for using mind magic on unwilling victims.
When the portal closed, the flow of magic suddenly stopped, but unlike the last few times she’d been on the human side of the portal after the three-night deadline, she could feel the weight of the Elements on her. Even if she had wanted to, she wouldn’t have been able to use her old methods of getting her way.
Maybe if I spoke to the girls, explained that I needed to make friends…maybe they could help me figure this curse out. And she did view it as a curse, it was an inhibition on her free will, magical in nature, and enforced by an outside entity. In fact, I don’t even need to say anything about it, I can just…let the curse do its thing! Let it stop me from explaining it, they’re not stupid…she watched Pinkie plow into the base of the statue, bouncing off it when the now inactive portal didn’t let her through, …okay, they’re mostly not stupid, maybe if I just suggested certain activities, or played word games…
Her vision suddenly blurred, and six hues seemed to spin up around her, but nobody else seemed to notice. She realized that this was happening inside her own head, somehow.
“Abuse of conditions attempted, not allowed.” echoed through her head.
Celestia was poleaxed. What, specifically, had triggered that? And why did the Elements respond so…coldly?
She watched the group of girls as they began to head into the gym. They weren’t looking in her direction, so they couldn’t see her raise her hand to flag them down, and also missed her opening her mouth to call out…and no sound emerged.
Clasping her throat, she spoke to herself in a hushed voice, “...no, no, no…oh, thank goodness!” she breathed a sigh of relief.
What happened there? she thought as she began directing the boys on their assigned cleanup duties.
Having been shown the error of her ways in perhaps the most forceful possible way, Celestia was determined to not go down that path again, but she was tired, emotionally drained, burdened with a curse that she couldn’t figure out yet, physically injured from the fall, her back and tailbone itched fiercely for reasons she hadn’t been able to investigate yet, and so when Snails grabbed the empty bucket instead of the one with the bricks…words came out that she hadn’t intended, “Get me the bucket of bricks you id…” Before she could finish the sentence, her voice choked off.
“Abuse of conditions attempted, not allowed.” echoed through her consciousness again.
That was an accident! she mentally shouted at the constructs. There was no response, just that not-quite-there-ness of the entities, that feeling of several presences surrounding her and binding her.
Sighing, she sighed and tried again, “Please give me the bucket of bricks.”
At least I can still ask for things nicely… maybe I can work within the restrictions the Elements put on this curse, use the virtues directly to figure out a way out of this…
“Abuse of conditions attempted, not allowed.”
For the first time, a moment of genuine fear stabbed at her. That was in response to my thoughts! But what had it done to her?
A few minutes later, Vice-principal Luna was dismissing them to go home, and for the first time since she had fled to this world…she didn’t want to go. “You’re done for the night,” said the older woman, “Come see me on Monday to receive whatever discipline we’ll have for you.”
The response came automatically, the basic courtesy drilled into her by the orphanage, her teachers, and the princess herself, “Th-tha-a-a-a...th-th-th…” and her vocal cords stopped working. The longer she tried to speak the simple word of gratitude, the harder it was to exhale, her body felt like it was being pressed in from all directions, and she started seeing the oddly gyrating lights in her vision. Before the sensations became too intense, she stopped trying to speak and just nodded her head, hoping the educator wouldn’t inquire further.
Her walk home was mostly automatic, and she found herself greatly wishing she’d ridden her motorcycle to the school that day. She hadn’t actually expected to need it after the dance, she was supposed to be back in Equestria by now, so rather than risk the thing stalling out on the road again, she had left it at the warehouse. The long walk gave her plenty of opportunities to think, though, trying to figure out what had happened, why the Elements were suddenly behaving so differently. She almost didn’t even think about the door she pushed her way through and then closed, her mind caught up on reviewing anything she’d ever learned about magic and the nature thereof to figure out why she suddenly was being restricted from basic communication. Absently, she pulled out her phone and shook it twice, activating the feature she’d stumbled onto for this particular brand of Cyborg phone to turn on the flashlight without turning on the screen. She devoted a little more thought to her navigation of the warehouse as it was a bit more hazardous than the walk had been, given the stripped and abandoned large machinery, tracks in the floor where large-scale platforms were moved from one end of the warehouse floor to another, and of course the tools and parts she had splayed around her motorcycle.
A brief pause of her light on the vehicle to confirm it was still in the same condition she’d left it, she played the light across the path she had left for herself through the building. I’m going to have to take it to a shop, she thought, If I’m going to be here for another 30 moons. Sighing at the thought, the other day-in, day-out tasks of life flooded her consciousness, tasks that she had been mentally preparing herself to never have to think of again. Probably going to have to get a job if I’m going to keep living on my own, probably going to need to move into an actual apartment, which will mean I’ll need to get better ID documents. Didn’t think I’d need ‘em long-term, now it looks like I’ll need them for…a very long time still.
Her progress through the warehouse had brought her to her room, which had once been the manager’s office. The realization that she may never return to Equestria sunk in with the finality of the “click” of the latch for the door engaging. Her throat tightened in a purely emotional response as she felt her eyes start to water. No, she told herself, You made your bed, now you get to lay in it. Sniffling and wiping her eyes dry with the heel of the hand not holding the phone, she turned and flicked on the small light by her bed before shaking the phone again to shut off the flashlight.
She sagged into a sitting position on her bed, shrugging out of her jacket and tossing it at the desk chair she’d set up across the room. She missed entirely but ignored the pile of cloth and leather as she sank into her thoughts. She yanked off her boots as she continued her mental checklist, I’ll need to pay my phone bill…and probably actually buy insurance for the motorcycle. My fake driver’s license passes muster at a traffic stop, but the old, “My insurance card is in the mail,” excuse is only going to work so many times. More clothes were in order, her body was proving that it had, indeed, reverted to the middle of adolescence when she first came through the portal years ago, and while growing taller didn’t seem to be a thing she’d need to worry about, her hips and bust were constantly waging a war on her wardrobe. Of course, that would mean she’d have to leave the warehouse and face the very community that she had spent years tearing apart and molding to her needs, only to have them see her for what she truly was; a monster.
She felt a slick knot of stress in the pit of her stomach and began experiencing a dark realization that even if she were to die in this warehouse, nobody would miss her. The girls who had been tasked with her would likely just wonder where she had disappeared to, the other students at the school would breathe a sigh of relief, and after having experienced the pain she’d caused them, she wouldn’t blame them. The teachers would simply mark her absent and, eventually, forget about her.
The Equestrians would probably send someone back through in 30 moons, and when they didn’t find Celestia within the three-day window, they’d likely report back to the princess that she was lost. She’d be presumed dead after a while, then her role in Equestria’s history would be just a footnote to Princess Twilight’s rule, then she’d be forgotten entirely.
She had no family, no loved ones, no friends, and after tonight Snips and Snails probably wouldn’t want to even be acquainted with her.
A buzzing in her hand and the sound of a classical piece that she’d taken a liking to from this world startled her out of her thoughts. While she would have sworn that she had just sat down moments before, her blaring alarm on her phone was evidence that she’d been sitting there for hours. As if to confirm her phone’s testimony, her muscles aching from fatigue and inactivity and the dim natural light of the pre-sunrise morning announced that it was, indeed, the day after the disaster that her plans had turned into.
Her thoughts returned to her predicament as she absently fished out the charging cable for her phone. Magic is a living thing, the reasoned, It’s flexible, allowing for the intent of the caster to shape the spells. She angled the bottom of the phone so she could clearly see the port on the bottom. Yet the Elements are acting…static, like they’re not alive. She pushed the connector into the port and flipped the phone to see the display as it bloomed to brightness, adding a bit more light to the room. A few notifications were still visible, as was the battery level and the time, displayed with the computer precision of a network-connected device.
…because it’s a computer, came the thought.
Celestia halted her movement, staring at the phone. A connection was trying to form between the thoughts in her head. Deliberately, she pushed the button on the side to shut off the display, then turned it back on.
Computers do what you tell them to. No matter how ‘smart’ they seem, they’re limited by their programming.
What was her subconscious trying to tell her?
Computers are dictated by their programming, and most of the ‘intelligence’ of computers, like my phone, comes from the way they’re connected to bigger, more powerful computers on the network…
She unlocked the phone and absently stroked her thumb up to move the app list, not really looking at the icons or names, just trying to make the connection her thoughts were forming.
The Elements are acting static, rigid… she absently tapped on an icon for an idle game that she had downloaded. After the first initial bout of interaction these games always required, she’d lost interest but never bothered to delete it. She watched as the lights and colors burst on the screen and the numbers tick upwards. Unless she interacted with it, the numbers would continue their steady climb, regardless of whether any of the goals or checkpoints for the game had been met. They were following their programming rigidly…
…like the Elements.
As though a cover were removed, Celestia could see the entire situation like a painting in a Canterlot museum. Different universes, especially those with clearly different processes in motion, regardless of how similar they may seem on the surface, have different laws of nature that govern their existence. The five fundamental forces of electromagnetism, gravity, weak and strong interactions, and magic can be tweaked just so, and of course, the nature of magic on this side of the portal meant that it was harder for the beings here to use it, which meant that the universe developed differently. The stellar bodies wouldn’t need any sort of intervention to move, equines wouldn’t have developed magic so simians took their place in the evolutionary ladder due to their more predatory nature and ability to develop tools without magic, and as they developed those tools and the rules for using them, they unwittingly would have shaped the very rules that dictated the unused magical force…
…which meant that the Elements had installed programs onto the computer of her soul, programs that required a connection to the living Equestrian magic on the other side of the portal. A connection that would be cut off for the next 30 moons.
A chill gripped her, she needed to get help, now. A curse like this running wildcat with only a few loosely defined rules would be catastrophic, for her if not resulting in a magical energy loop. Where could she find help, though? Twilight wouldn’t be back for another 30 moons at the earliest, and the portal was closed. The Element of Magic was gone, and that meant that there were no magical means of opening the portal.
But that wasn’t the last magical artifact in this world that she had access to.
Key…I’ll need a key to the building! she thought, I think I’ve still got the janitor’s contact info, I’ll need to write this out, somehow communicate that it’s urgent without actually speaking. Frantically, she reached for her phone and unlocked the screen. She tapped into the app for messaging, and put down her thumb…only to have it slide off the phone’s screen. The resulting garbage word on her phone was worthless, so she tapped on the backspace button and put her thumb on the screen…and it slid off again, regardless of what she wanted to type.
OK…don’t panic! she told herself. You’ve broken into the school before without being caught or leaving any evidence, the same security holes should still be there. She grabbed her phone and scrambled to her bedroom door. Opening it, she was faced with a still dark warehouse. Shaking the phone to life, she navigated down to her motorcycle. There was no time to waste, if the curse was progressing down her possible communication channels, even if the journal still worked, all the princess would wind up seeing would be a bunch of random scribbles made by a ballpoint pen.
She hopped on her motorcycle, intending to start it up, walk it over to the door, shove the loading bay door open enough to drive out, and just leave without securing the warehouse. It wasn’t like she could lock up anyway, and if this plan failed, she may wind up being a mute teenager, unable to even ask for help, probably eventually starving to death because she couldn’t get food…
…stop that Celestia, you are being over-dramatic! She wasn’t starving yet, she wasn’t even hungry. She tucked her phone into her jeans pocket, not even shutting off the light in her haste, and stomped down on the kick-start, barefoot smarting as it connected with the metal lever. The engine sputtered briefly but didn’t start. A slight, tell-tale gurgle told her exactly what the problem was. Oh, not now! The bike had been a junkyard find, not even in the vehicle section of the yard, just tossed by some particularly strong yard-hand into a pile. Celestia had snuck it away and spent the better part of 9 months slowly patching it up until it could start and run somewhat reliably. It was good for the occasional trip downtown or to one of the suburbs, but sometimes wouldn’t even start. She figured out over time that there was a leak somewhere between the cooling system and the oil feed. Exactly what she hadn’t yet figured out, but she did know if she poured enough stop-leak into the coolant it would let the engine run enough to get her where she needed to be.
She grabbed the stop-leak and popped off the cap for the coolant reservoir, and sure enough, it was nearly dry. She’d dealt with this before, so knew that one bottle of the stop-leak would be enough to fill the coolant tank and seal the leak…wherever it happened to be, so she just shoved the bottle opening in and let it glug until empty. She yanked it out and put the cap back on the coolant bottle, then stood next to the bike to stomp on the kick start again. This time the engine sputtered to life but threatened to stop again. She’d dealt with this, too, so she reached across the bike and yanked back on the throttle, forcing the engine to rev.
She heard the hiss moments before her world went white-black with pain. She found herself on her back and covered with greasy and hot coolant. Weakly, she stood and staggered her way over to the emergency water station off to the side of the warehouse floor. The warehouse must have had to deal with some variety of toxic chemicals, as there was a station for emergency rinsing on both sides of the building. This particular station did work, but only if the reservoir was full, as she found out one bored summer Sunday when school was out and there was nothing to do but explore her surroundings. The cold of the water did little to stop the pain, and she realized that her right arm was the odd combination of on fire and numbness that comes from being freshly injured. She had activated the emergency shower with her left hand out of instinct, apparently. The running water continually rinsed away the blood, which let her see the jags of metal that were embedded in her hand and wrist.
As though watching someone else do it, she watched her left hand move up to her right wrist and gently tease the metal slivers out. As her hand worked on removing the remaining bits of metal, she looked over at the motorcycle to see one of the coolant pipes, directly under where her right hand had been while twisting the throttle, was blown outward. Coolant and stop-leak were oozing out of the pipe, which wasn’t supposed to have enough pressure in it to allow for any of the (much more sludgy substance than it should be) fluid to still be pouring out, but she also saw that the stop-leak had started bonding with metal slivers and was coming out in clumps.
She had accidentally given her motorcycle a heart attack, clogging its major artery, then trying to blast coolant through. The pipe burst before the obstruction that had built up could.
Absently, she realized she needed to call an ambulance. She’d figure out how to pay the bill for it later…or even provide the ID the hospital would need. She needed medical attention.
Then the realization hit her. She was standing under sluicing water. Even as she thought about the realization the reservoir ran out and the shower petered off to a dribble. She reached into her back pocket with her left hand, pulled out the device, and held the soaked phone up. Futility, she squeezed the button to activate the phone a couple of times.
Nothing. The phone was dead.
Forget dying of starvation, she’d die of blood loss first.
She didn’t consciously let go of the phone, she just stopped holding it up. It clattered to the floor of the warehouse, the screen shattering as it fell into the puddle of water at her feet.
Celestia started walking. She didn’t know where she was going, and she didn’t care. She had nothing, she was already dead. In a detached way, she wondered if she had died when her motorcycle blew up and she was just a ghost. The oncoming light of dawn was no comfort, it was just there. She felt the gravel and debris under her feet as she staggered, felt the drops of blood as they occasionally fell on her right foot as she moved, but didn’t register any pain. Dead people don’t feel pain, right? she reasoned, …so why does being dead hurt so much?
Numbly, she stumbled through the warehouse district. Abruptly, she realized she was standing on the railroad tracks that ran by the warehouse. The warehouses lining the tracks originally had built-in docks for the freight cars, but when the city built a central train hub in the next district, the trains had no need to stop at the warehouses one by one, so the docks were fenced off, but the tracks were still kept in operating condition. They weren’t used much, but on weekends, at least one train hauling freight blasted through.
And right there, an answer presented itself when she hadn’t yet asked the question. How does a dead person stop hurting? she thought, Take away the body, then the pain goes away…
With slow deliberation, she centered herself on the tracks and waited. She heard the blare of a train horn, which always started when they were entering the district due to some local ordinance or other, and she turned to face it.
Absently, she noticed the sensation that the feux-Elements were spinning up again. She had been pushed beyond caring, and unless they were able to puppet her body, they weren’t going to be able to stop her.
Before she could find out if they could, she was tackled off the tracks by Rainbow Dash.
Over the next 48 hours, Celestia remained in a numbed, shocked state. She was distantly aware that her arm was being taken care of, as were most of her other physical needs. She followed directions, slept where and when they told her to, attended whatever meeting they asked her, and took the medications they handed her. But she didn’t say anything.
After all, she couldn’t speak.
Two days after being admitted to the hospital, the Apple family was picking her up again. Applebloom at first treated her like a sack of primed C4, but once it was made clear that Celestia wasn’t a threat, relegated the former bully to “background” and otherwise mostly ignored her. Applejack was just quietly there, never pushing herself onto Celestia, but also making sure she knew the farmgirl was present. Big Macintosh did his best to help in his quiet way and seemed to be comfortable in her presence, and Granny Smith always just looked a bit sad. When the other girls started coming to keep watch over her, she simply…existed. Pinkie Pie seemed to never be alone with her, which meant that one of the others was always a mitigating presence, something Celestia was grateful for.
Then…she came in. The mirror image of her mentor, someone who didn’t know the princess (and by proxy, the principal) may not have noticed, but Celestia could tell the woman was tired. The amount of bureaucratic drudgery that she had to have endured because of the incident with Equestrian magic must have been nightmare-inducing, and yet the woman wasn’t angry at her, wasn’t there to lecture, she was there to help…
Celestia just couldn’t figure out why…
Why would she help me? I’m worthless! I’ve failed at everything, I have nothing to give her in exchange…why is she here?! The voice in her head was not the pseudo-Elements, it was her own. They were still there, but they were passive, not intervening in her internal monologue.
I should figure out how to tell her to not bother, I’ll only disappoint her. But a small part of herself spoke up then, But what if she can help? Even if it’s just to have a place for a little while, just a quiet place where we can pretend, even just a little longer, that I never lost anything.
But I lost it all when Twilight Sparkle won.
That’s not when I lost everything, though, the small voice chided her, I lost everything when the princess didn’t want to be my mom.
The reminder was almost enough to cause her to start crying again. Instead, she began raising her hand.
The principal took her into her car, and Celestia expected the lecturing to start.
It did not.
The principal offered Celestia food. It had meat in it, something she’d avoided eating as soon as she figured out what the food being served on this side of the portal was. She expected the “lessons” that served as chastisement to start.
They did not.
Celestia couldn’t figure the woman out.I hurt her just as much as anyone at the school…probably more given she’s the one that needs to deal with the fallout, she thought, Why isn’t she using this as a chance to get back at me?
The first awkward night was so overwhelmingly good compared to the previous two weeks she couldn’t properly process it. It was like she was dreaming, but unlike her actual dreams of late, it wasn’t accompanied by magical backlash, the mocking laughter of her classmates (which all sounded suspiciously like the fillies and colts from her time in Equestria, not so much like the students at Canterlot High), or a particularly vindictive Twilight Sparkle dragging her back to Equestria for summary judgment. She kept expecting someone to jump out at her and point out the demon wings or for the zombified students of the school to tear down the wall and start eating her alive. But then the principal started singing a sappy song that was on the top-ten charts decades ago, and somehow she never felt safer or more secure in her young life.
Vice-principal Luna (who Sunset somehow never connected the dots that the two adult women in the house were sisters until she also occupied the same residence…which let her figure out a lot about the Nightmare Moon stories that weren’t taught in schools when she was a filly) was distant at first but seemed to warm up to her readily enough. The sisters would talk about their day, Luna updating her sister on the events at school, and occasionally banter as though Celestia weren’t in the room. It was oddly domestic, and she started to see her principal as a different person from the princess…and that gave her even more hope for reasons she couldn’t quite figure out.
The first time she was left alone since the Fall Formal had been somewhat harrowing. Rather than allow her mind to dwell on the silence and being alone…and the temptation to slip into darkness that would bring…she decided to raid the tiny library that occupied a wall of her hostess’ bedroom. At first, she couldn’t track why there was such a different selection split between two sets of shelves but decided to pull from the collection that had some more fanciful titles. The Jewelbox Files caught her eye, and on reading the preview text on the back of the novel figured out it was the fictitious account of a human magic user in modern Chicacolt and how they managed to survive and thrive in spite of being viewed with suspicion by the authorities.
The obvious self-identification with the protagonist was not lost on her.
When the principal returned with the new phone, she wasn’t sure how to deal with it. On the one hand, it was a new phone, one which she may not be able to do much with besides unlocking the screen. On the other, it was possibly a loaded relationship mine, one to trigger whenever the principal felt she needed leverage. Then she saw her cutiemark on the case, and her heart nearly stopped. Humans didn’t have cutiemarks. Sure, they often wound up with pins or symbols in their clothing that seemed to match their pony counterparts, but there was no reason this version of her mentor could understand the significance of this design.
She planned her approach. She wasn’t sure if she could even do what she was about to try, but even if the attempt finished what she started by standing in front of a train, she was going to show this woman some gratitude for her generosity.
She began speaking. Just forming the sounds required immense physical control, and she almost couldn’t see from the spinning colors and lights from the pseudo-Elements. The compression on her soul started to hurt physically, somehow, a feeling like she was shoving a limb into some heavy machinery while it was still operating. She could feel it when her vocal cords stopped working and the final syllable of “thank you” came out as barely more than a hiss. Once she stopped trying to speak, the pseudo-Elements suddenly stilled, and the crushing sensations suddenly stopped. She sagged against her hostess, her muscles somehow aching in response to her spiritual trial.
Suddenly, her world was awash in light. Rainbow colors, a pure wash of magic this time and not just the fragmented not-spinning of the pseudo-Elements, flooded her vision. The whirlwind of color coalesced into a ring with five locus points around the ring and one in the center, connected like a star. Each locus point was a color, blue, pink, orange, red, and lavender around the ring, and a bright white in the center. The light seemed to resemble some sort of clockwork mechanism, and as she watched, the lavender locus on the ring formed into a four-pointed gemstone, and it was as though the ring of light slid around. If she were to make any comparison to a real-world object rather than something that was just in her mind, she’d say it was like an extremely fancy lock.
All at once, the light fled, and for a moment it felt like the world was dark. Her vision began to adjust, and she realized she was being held by the principal.
Before she had a chance to feel embarrassed, she was suddenly seized with the need to write! She practically leaped across the table and grabbed a pen and paper and began to write names. She wasn’t even sure what she was writing, just that the names she was writing down were important. Faster than she could write, names of other students, teachers, and members of the community were flooding her mind, as though the people the names were attached to were flooding her mind. When her hostess put the list of names from the student roster in front of her, it was like all the people whose names she could see on the list suddenly stopped shouting their own names at her. She flipped through the pages, reviewing the names, and small whispers of why the names were important to her began floating up in her mind. Broken friendships, shattered trust, damaged relationships…it was a list of her crimes against the people around her in this world represented merely by their names. Some had litanies of injury so long that if she were to list them all she’d be writing for a week. Some had only one accusation against her.
When she finished the list, the chorus in her mind was quieter, but not yet silenced. She began writing the teacher’s names, and shortly another printed list was presented to her, and once she finished reviewing the staff roster, she only had a handful of names that weren’t in a handy database.
By this time, the clamor of names was silent, but the whisper of her crimes against Harmony was near deafening. If her hostess was saying anything to her, she couldn’t hear it. She needed to organize the names, put them together in ways that let her see the relationships, find the broken connections and restore them somehow. She wasn’t sure how she would do that, but that was all she could think to do. She began tearing the lists of names into strips, and she was handed a pair of scissors. When she began laying the names down on fresh pieces of paper with drawn lines between them, then having to scrap the original pages and create new ones when the lines she drew weren’t correct or there weren’t enough, she was handed some string. Once the relationship web grew big enough, the names she still hadn’t attached, the supplies they still had, and the web that she’d assembled thus far were transferred to the guest room, where the principal had already cleared a wall.
She worked frantically, scrambling to get the names up so the chorus in her mind would quiet. She began coloring the string, then using the offered colors to add to the web. Family groups were formed, even among people that weren’t related by blood. Scootaloo was connected to Rainbow Dash by a family tie, even though they weren’t actually sisters. Rarity and Pinkie Pie had enough strings coming off their names to snare a whale, and Fluttershy only had a few connections.
In the middle of the web were the five girls that had stood with Twilight. They were connected by the center, but there was no name for the person who should be there, so she just wrote “Magic?” on a piece of paper, since Twilight’s element was Magic, and she assumed the other five girls represented the other elements somehow.
Dinner came and went, she ate as much as she could between positioning names. The two sisters that were counterparts to the princesses back home were placed near the five in the middle, with “friend” connections between the girls, but a family connection to the middle.
She didn’t remember falling asleep, but when she awoke the next day, she looked up at the wall and saw what she had made. While impressive, her heart sank. It was a testament to her hubris, a monument to the lives she’d damaged in her ambition to claim the title of “princess” for herself. She touched one of the strings, knowing it represented a family tie that she’d broken. Silver Spoon and Diamond Tiara are sisters? She thought. Well, maybe not by blood, but they are inseparable.
Somehow, she was supposed to fix all of it. She had no idea how.
Her first day of school after the Fall Formal was a terrifying prospect, but she knew she had to face it if she was going to be able to live her life. Besides, she knew free-loading off the principal and her sister wasn’t in the cards for the long-term, so returning to something resembling normalcy would only be a benefit.
The bullying…was expected. She was prepared to let the students take out their years of anger and frustration on her. Rainbow Dash coming to her defense was not expected, and the display of magical speed was an absolute shock. She must still have Equestrian magic! she thought, I thought it was cut off when the portal closed…but what if it’s growing on top of the already existing magical field here?
The urge to study and test was only curtailed by her inability to write anything down, and unless you can write it down (so the saying went), you were just screwing around.
She didn’t know how to thank Rainbow Dash, and even if she’d been able to speak, the jock probably wouldn’t care about the words. When she heard about Dash’s detention, she felt guilty. Dash was only coming to her defense, so it didn’t feel right that the other girl should be paying for her good deed by serving punishment. So she decided she was going to join the girl in solidarity.
Celestia didn’t think she’d earn a friend. She didn’t think she’d like Rainbow at all, really, she thought the other girl was just too obsessed with sports to think of anything but her own skills…but she realized that sold the other girl severely short. In the hour she was with Dash in the detention room (and she knew the older woman had left them alone on purpose, she learned that the bravado masked a truly impressive drive that had matched her own, but steered and guided by a heart of gold.
When Luna declared the detention served, the rainbow returned, this time the red locus reconfigured into a stylized lightning bolt and more of the struts and arches of light slid out of the way. Of what, Celestia still couldn’t be sure. By the time the light faded from her eyes and her vision returned, she was marching down the street, very quickly redirected into the principal’s car and driven to her home.
Celestia’s frenetic work on the relationship matrix was brief, not nearly as much work needed to be done this time, but it reconfigured quite a bit. The relationship between Rainbow Dash and the center of the element’s circle currently labeled “Magic?” was now the blue string that represented friendship, and from that a cascade of white string had been replaced with blue, and some of the red had been twinned with blue as well.
When she was finished, she took in the whole of the wall of names and string and was struck by a wave of vertigo. That one change…that one new friendship altered half the web! She had pulled the strings (metaphorically, of course) of the girl’s friendships before, but she’d never realized the extent. The five girls were so heavily woven together and they cast such a wide net…Celestia realized it might take less work than she thought to fix her mistakes.
Work that she had no idea how to go about doing.
The next day, she and her hostess set about exploring the features of the phone and downloading and installing the assistive software. Just being able to answer basic questions was a huge relief, and she experimented with responses of the “yes,” “no,” and “maybe” variety. A few of the other available buttons were connected to the word “thanks,” and “bathroom.” The principal was the one to find the part of the app that allowed someone to form a sentence from the words in the limited dictionary. Celestia didn’t even let herself think of using it. The entities in her head were reacting to her thoughts. If she allowed herself to openly and consciously think about communicating with the phone beyond the basic commands, she may lose the use of the phone as well.
Hearth’s Warming rolled around soon after. This would be her first in the human world with a family around her, one that she was rapidly beginning to feel like she was part of. Any time that notion entered her mind, though, she quashed it; she’d gotten her hopes up about finally finding a family years before when she’d gone through puberty the first time. It still hurt, and the feelings of being home were just too new and too raw, she didn’t have any way of dealing with the sudden exposure to the trigger of Hearth’s Warming decorations being put up by her hostess…who she’d begun to feel was her mom, way down in her heart of hearts.
And she just couldn’t. She couldn’t face that heartbreak again. Before the principal could see her fall to pieces, she ran to the guest room and closed the door firmly, but didn’t slam it because she had grown to care too much about the women in the house to make them think her breakdown was their fault.
After rebuffing the inquiries at her door, wept, and she forced herself to do so very, very quietly. It wasn’t this version of the woman who was princess back in Equestria that rejected her over and over, it wasn’t the principal that had passed over the first student she’d taken in directly in centuries in favor of a country bumpkin that happened to stumble into being an alicorn. They aren’t my family, they are just being nice to me, they don’t care beyond making sure I don’t die out in the world. They’re better than most but no different than the orphanage. I cannot let myself…let myself even hope for being accepted here…of being loved. I don’t deserve a family…I don’t deserve a mom…
Those thoughts were all she allowed herself to think during dinner, and it worked as a mantra against the feelings of, “I’m home,” that came up every time she looked at the tree. It was a relief to leave the room and go to bed, and she was so emotionally wrung out that she fell asleep nearly as soon as she got under the covers.
Her surprise at finding the principal on the floor outside her bedroom door was surpassed only by the tale of how it happened that she got there. Multiverse theory was, of course, an early 200s course at the School for Gifted Unicorns, anyone who started to learn how to teleport had to take the course, and naturally being Equestria’s only (so far as she knew) long-term expatriate living in another universe, she was living the evidence that other versions of herself existed in the multiverse…but to have her hostess tell so many details of her own past was at once mortifying (in the “don’t look at my filly pictures!” way) and exhilarating. Someone else knew exactly what her life was like before the mirror! Well, the holidays, but it was enough of a microcosm of her life that she somehow didn’t feel quite so alone.
And the Anon-a-miss incident that seemed to happen in so many other universes to those other versions of her? She wasn’t sure if it was worth the trade to have her current condition compared to having the school turn on her…but she supposed that having all that progress she had made in those other worlds suddenly ripped away by a trio of jealous underclassmen…the thought was chilling.
And those strange alternate futures? A vampire? A vampire hunter?! Getting married to Luna of all people?
And throughout it all, she kept glancing at the packet. The stack of paper on the table between her and the obviously exhausted woman could be many things, and a small part of her was hoping against hope that it meant she finally had a home. But there could be other things in there. Just a form of ID or some real documentation to prove she existed.
But she didn’t dare hope for anything more than that.
And then she had a mom.
Just like that, she had a mom, a fulfillment of a dream that had been crushed, a filly-hood wish given form. And the woman was so unsure, she didn’t think Celestia would want to have her as a mom.
If she ever got her ability to speak back, she’d never, ever let a day go by without telling her new mom how much she loved her.
When the Equestrians made contact, Celestia was ambivalent. She didn’t think they’d try to force her to go back through the portal, but if they did she’d show them a few things about how the dominant species of this world managed to become the dominant species. This turned out to be a non-issue, however. Other than the princess’ odd behavior, nobody seemed to be at all inclined to remove Celestia from her new home.
Princess Twilight was a breath of fresh air, a fellow Equestrian that was just as familiar (well, more familiar than the average Equestrian) with the world that she now called home, and it was nice to have someone around who had so many experiences in common…but just the same the gaps in Twilight’s knowledge of this world’s magic were maddening…and she began to lose hope again. She’d never try to take her own life again, but it was clear that none of the mages or the princesses had even remotely thought of questioning their own assumptions about the workings of magic, and Celestia couldn’t correct them.
When Fluttershy began keeping an eye on her, at first she was grateful for a friend, but the longer the silent girl was near, the more Celestia’s memory played back all the ways she’d hurt the shy girl. And the memory of the pain and anguish that Fluttershy, specifically, had endured…she could no longer face it. She could no longer tolerate the person she had been, and being around Fluttershy was forcing her to remember it. What she had done was inexcusable, especially when she realized it was her that drove Fluttershy to attempt what she had also done.
And Fluttershy had forgiven her, and that alone nearly broke her. How could she forgive me?! I nearly killed her! It may have been Fluttershy’s hand that took the action, but it had been Sunset’s words that caused it. Celestia could never take back any of it, Fluttershy had been just as close to simply not being alive as Celestia had been, and if her attempt had been anything like the former unicorn’s, then it was only by the barest of moments and pure luck that she had survived. And more incredibly, she believed Fluttershy, sweet, kind Fluttershy, truly forgave her. Her heart broke into a million pieces, and she cried for all that could have been if Celestia had just offered friendship instead of being a bully. Whatever destiny she had been pursuing hadn’t been worth it, would never be worth all the pain and suffering she’d caused the girl who now wanted to be her friend. Any remaining thoughts of somehow regaining her path to her former “destiny” were tossed out like yesterday’s cafeteria lunch, any dreams of princess-hood or alicorn ascension would never be as important to her as this moment of being relieved of a burden she hadn’t even been aware she was carrying.
It wasn’t until she woke up that she realized that she’d encountered another of the girls showing Equestrian magic, she had grown so used to sleeping with a pair of wings around her as a filly that she had started to take it for granted that the princess would hold her like that. And that reminded her that, for all that she’d received forgiveness from Fluttershy, she had a long way to go to offer repentance to all the people she’d wronged, starting with the members of the Equestrian delegation and one pony in particular…which was when she experienced the third flash of rainbow brilliance.
She was alone this time, but that was okay because she was in her own bedroom, and they’d stocked up on the supplies she’d need. Her adoptive mother found her working away when Celestia didn’t respond to calls for breakfast, the woman clearly making the appropriate connections and coming to the correct conclusion by immediately making calls and getting Luna to take over what duties she could.
She hardly expected her day to end as it had begun, but after the visit to the monastery factory, all the little pieces of the puzzle of what Pinkie had been trying to teach her in that uniquely “Pinkie Pie” way came together. It was not a huge surprise in retrospect, really; the kindness to accept forgiveness of yourself is what allows for accepting that life is full of ups and downs, heartbreak and ecstasy, and without allowing the pain to happen in life, nobody would ever experience what comes after it, and that which comes after is so much sweeter than if it had been handed out on a silver platter. The princess…tried to teach me that, she recalled, She tried to tell me a lesson she’d learned a thousand years ago, but I chose to ignore her because I thought…I thought that a pony shouldn’t have to go through pain…
Having once again worked herself practically to exhaustion, she had just enough energy to take a quick shower and crawl into bed.
The week that followed was…a bit frustrating. While it was largely a hunch, she suspected that the final piece of the puzzle was within reach, and Twilight (who she was rapidly learning she had severely misjudged) and the other Equestrian mages were still pursuing the wrong avenues of study. No matter how they cast, what theories they tried, how many crystals they burned out, the kept trying to treat the curse as a single living organism as you would any other out-of-control spell in Equestria instead of five interlocking programs in a computer. Just like watching a boomer hit the case of a computer as though it could feel pain, the spells being cast on her were simply bouncing off the surface of the “lock” on her autonomy. If it didn’t create a psychic backlash in her mind space, rather like having her head stuck in a bell and banged on repeatedly, she would care less about their ineffective attempts. Had her mom not offered to take her away from it all for a weekend, she was going to just start refusing tests.
The time she spent at the farm was bitter-sweet. On the one hand, it was back where she was at her lowest outside the warehouse, on the other, it was always an environment of familial love and support, and it was clear that even the people who weren’t ‘official’ Apples were still kin if the Apple family said so. Rarity was…somehow being so very forgiving. She made it clear that she hadn’t forgotten in the slightest what happened with the Spring Fling, but it was as though it had been a minor spat between friends instead of a massive amount of broken trust.
And then a tractor-trailer fell on her.
Even dazed after the initial impact, she recognized that she was extremely lucky to have been on the outskirts of the impact, but that was shortly followed up with the realization that Rarity may not have been so lucky. She obviously hadn’t been the only one to come to that conclusion, because Applejack was just as quickly at “ground zero” for the impact…and showing every sign of uncontrolled magic use. She had seen it before, been through it herself, and was trying to get close enough to shock the other girl out of it. One of the documentaries shown in her science classes was about sharks and how you could startle them out of attacking if you punched them in the eye. While not wanting to really hurt her friend, she was hoping a gentle poke might do the trick since none of the other physical intervention was working. Unfortunately, she couldn’t safely get her hands to Applejack’s face without causing the girl injury.
And then the healer showed up. Zebra…! thought Celestia. She recognized the glyph on the woman’s bag as being a Zebrican glyph. Not really a spell, but very much like a pony’s Cutiemark, but with some differences in how they came to be and what they meant…or at least that was what the Zebrican ambassadors would tell her when asked about it. While not hostile, the zebras were somewhat secretive with their culture and considered their glyph marks to be sacred in a different way than ponies viewed their cutiemarks.
She watched Zecora disarm the ticking time bomb that was Applejack running on wildcat’d magical energy without expending a single spell or taking any injury, something not even the mages at the School for Gifted Unicorns had been able to do reliably. This woman will be able to get Rarity out! she realized, and she pulled out her phone.
Her mind was racing a mile a minute, looking for alternatives to what she was about to do, ways to create the results she wanted without committing to this path. She could sense the pseudo-Elements starting up, beginning to intercept her thoughts and plans, the only thing that kept her going was that so many of them were being discarded as unworkable nearly as fast as she thought of them. If I do this, she thought to herself, I won’t be able to communicate at all beyond the simplest of gestures. The thought of gestures as a way to communicate led to thoughts of sign language that she’d used by the two deaf students of the school, which lead to a chorus of, “Abuse of conditions attempted, not allowed,” through her mental space as that avenue of communication was shut down. It felt like bars were being embedded under her muscles but over her bones as she felt her arms stiffen. Thoughts of gestures also lead to “yes” and “no” and shrugging which could contain a multitude of meanings that, if the right questions were asked, could mean someone could guess at the nature of the curse. The mental sound of the entities installed in her soul was nearly deafening, and she realized she was running out of time.
I will have one shot at this, she thought, I need to make it count, what do I say? What can I communicate before my hands stop working?
Four words. She managed a punctuation mark to separate the phrase for clarity, but her thumbs stopped tapping on the dictionary buttons at the fourth word. Any further attempts wouldn’t even let her thumb contact the section of the screen where the dictionary was spread out.
She waited for the right moment, grabbed Applejack’s hand, and communicated the last thought she’d ever get a chance to relay outside her own head.
“Trust me, trust her”
It was a long shot, perhaps her only chance to help Rarity and, of course, keep Applejack from panicking. Celestia had no reason to think that Applejack would even take any counsel from her, unlike the others in their friend group, there hadn’t been any one major experience that set the tone for their relationship, nor had they interacted much beyond just being around each other. That had apparently been enough for the farmgirl, however, as she stepped aside and let Zecora work.
With everyone’s attention on Rarity, nobody saw Celestia stumble backward, awkwardly moving her body over to the barn. Before she could collapse, she managed to get herself to a seated position, clutching the phone to her chest with her arms, unable to grasp it. She slumped down, not caring for comfort, just hoping she could keep holding the phone. Gingerly, she lowered her hands away from her chest, and before she could even so much as glance at the screen, it fell from her hands and created a little crater in the dust between her boots.
She didn’t know how long it took for the others to board the ambulances and for the principal to notice her absence, she was trying hard not to think of anything. Just focussing on the fallen phone, reciting old lessons in her head, playing back musical earworms from the playlist of her memories, doing whatever she could to not have to think about what she had done and her current state.
When her mom held her hands, she had to bring herself out of that state, put herself in the position of being in control of her body, in whatever form the malfunctioning pseudo-Elements would allow, to hold her mother’s hand in response. When the older woman put the phone in her hands and it simply slipped out again, she wished with all her might that she could have one last chance to speak, to at least tell her mother how much she loved her, how much she had come to find a home and family here where she had never had one before.
Celestia felt her eyes grow wet, but couldn’t bring herself to cry. “Please,” she said using the voice in her mind-scape, “Let me go.” When no response came, she continued, “I know…I know I was horrible before, and I see that now. I never want to be that person again, she was cruel and full of fear and so easily hurt…I thought being strong meant you had to hurt others, pull them down before they could hurt you. I thought I had to take and hoard everything in order to have anything. I thought I could only feel happiness if others felt miserable…that only the weak showed mercy and compassion…I hid myself away, showed the world a mask of anger and spite to protect myself…until I forgot myself.”
The memory of seeing Rarity trapped in the force bubble and Applejack being willing to tear her own body apart to save the girl she loved played back in her mind’s eye. “I would save them again. I would do it every time, I would sacrifice my life for them if necessary.” Moments with her other friends followed, Rainbow actually learning chess just so Celestia would know someone cared about her, Pinkie bringing light to a dying woman, Fluttershy quietly loving the whole world. “I would do it for any of them.”
Her mother’s frantic crying and choked-off sobs seemed to float into her awareness. “...but please, please let me tell my…my mom that I love her. Just once. I only ask for the once.”
And Celestia blinked.
The crushing weight of sadness suddenly lessened until she was aware that something…wasn’t right. Beyond the wrongness of the malfunctioning pseudo-Elements, beyond the events surrounding her that led to problems for her friends and family, there was something else wrong…and she realized she had the tools to figure this out.
Three realities suddenly flooded her consciousness.
One was almost an echo of a real event, something she could remember that predated the events after the portal opened for the first time in her memory, but it was hollow, like the entire moment was just shadow puppets and vapor, but with so much pain and fear connected to it that the miasma was practically its own reality. She remembered being stabbed by Luna, and that had happened when she was in her early 20’s.
A second, one where she survived being nearly mortally wounded and went on to become an educator and eventually have the privilege of adopting a daughter was like a shock to her soul.
The third was the reel of memories she had just cycled through, as though she were an actor in a play and she had reached the end of the script.
“This isn’t right.” she declared into the mindscape.
Almost instantly, the expanse that she had stood in judgment during the events of the Fall Formal coalesced around her. In the distance, she could see the “lock” near a pool of light, its mechanism seized by a complex knot of interweaving streamers of shimmering and glowing luminescence. Those streamers extended throughout the mindscape and into the darkness beyond her perception, and she intuited that they were the mechanisms locking her in the prison of her own consciousness.
The star rose above the others, its motion rigid and mechanical in comparison to the time it had done the same at the Fall Formal, “Sunset Shimmer, you have abused the power of the manifestation of Friendship|Magic,” it recited, the two words of Friendship and Magic spoken at the same time, “You have ignored the lessons laid at your feet and reached for a gift that you are not prepared for.”
And Celestia remembered…
…and said, “I am not Sunset Shimmer.”
All at once, all the pseudo-Elements practically roared to life. The entire world tilted and rotated without moving until the orange shape took the place of the star, and she could now see it resembled an orange-colored apple, of all the odd things. It flared up, bright and almost angry, its light flashing out at her, passing through, and seemingly doing nothing. It began to spin and gyrate faster, it’s motions more and more erratic until its tendrils started overlapping the other lights, which were themselves cycloning wildly.
Perhaps it was intuition or maybe it was the borrowed memories from Sunset, but Celestia knew instinctively what to do. She formed a Tower of Will, an ancient unicorn technique designed to still the mind and allow the emotions and random surges of the unconscious to storm around their conscious mind. It was used when a filly or colt was going through a magic surge and was one of the earliest lessons taught to young unicorns. Instantly, a barrier appeared before her, and oddly enough another rose around the pool of light the lock was hovering next to. The storm of light was nothing like the Rainbow of Light Sunset had experienced at the Fall Formal, this was a hurricane, a stellar storm that would terrify Discord himself. One by one, the tethers that led off into the darkness snapped and blinked out of existence, the pseudo-Elements fracturing themselves and then fading away as they lost their coherence and potency. It could have been days, or it could have been seconds, but the storm soon faded, and Celestia stood in a solitary splash of light in the darkness.
The pseudo-Elements were gone, their tendrils of light and constricting effects vanished, and the lock was no more.
Her memories from reliving Sunset’s life were starting to fade from familiar intimacy to an almost dream-like recollection. She could recall the events, but it was like she had read them from a book or watched a particularly riveting docu-drama.
She glanced down at her form and saw a pendant on her neck with what she remembered was a rune in High Elven for “Teacher.” Her normal pantsuit was on her mental body, but it was the high-grade silks and custom tailoring preferred by her vampire lord counterpart. At her waist was a very high-tech belt, and on one side was strapped her sword and hanging on a shoulder strap on the other hip was a carbine she had used while in the universe with the Hunter version of herself and her family. She had some thought from the lessons Sunset had been through regarding mind magic and mental discipline that the form she now held was her truest mental self. It wasn’t necessarily a reflection of her soul, but how her mind thought of itself. A brief test of running her tongue across her teeth revealed that, yes, her canines were vampire sharp.
She chose to put that on the back burner for the moment and turned her attention to her environment. She was far from finished, or she wouldn’t still be in the mindscape.
There was very little to see. Just her in a pool of light…and one other pool of light. Now that the tendrils of luminescence were no longer polluting the mindscape, she could see that the other pool of light was also occupied. With nothing else to guide her, she walked over to the other occupant and guessed what she’d find long before her eyes confirmed it.
Laying on what constituted a floor for this ethereal realm was a small orange unicorn filly, small enough that she probably shouldn’t have a cutiemark, but she did. The familiar sunburst with yin/yang swirling identified this filly as surely as if she’d said her name.
Celestia had found her daughter.
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11089751
Considering Princess Luna's sister literally raises the sun every day...
In all seriousness, younger siblings never really completely shake their slight hero-worship of their elder siblings. I say this as and elder sibling. This can come out in weird ways. My sister segfaults whenever she sees me on camera because I look more and more feminine, which doesn't match the big "brother" she thought she grew up with and thought the world of. It's not an overwhelming thing (we still "take the mickey out on each other", to borrow a phrase) like Twilight's nearly worshiping Celestia, but it's always just there, usually manifesting as a disappointment when the elder fails to live up to the expectations of the younger.
Somebody needs to take the memory of this whole thing back through the mirror in a pensive and smack Harmony over the head with it.
The pensive, not the memory.
Memory's for Twilight.
d-did you mean to put um here because that's one hell of a spelling mistake lmfao
missing a few spaces and an extra space in this one
--
Don't know why the chapter was prelabeled as being confusing, it took a second but it was fairly simple to understand. My understanding is Celestia was forced to live Sunset's experiences to get to the curse, except she believed she was Sunset the entire time until the very end, where she finally remembered who she was, and finally reached her daughter.
An interesting chapter, not my favorite but it's at least interesting to see more of the curse and it's hopeful conclusion, along with more of Sunset and what she went through.
11094333
i.postimg.cc/rpX6tJv7/definition.png
source
I meant what I said and I said what I meant, an
elephant's wordauthor's abuse of the language 100%.You did better than half the people I use to bounce my ideas off of, then.
11094322
11094351
If, at any point, your "just punishment" drives someone to attempt suicide, you have monumentally kriffed up. Sunset better get an abject apology from all seven of those things.
Loved the formatting structure by the way, very nice.
11094362
100% correct.
On a <sarcasm>completely unrelated note</sarcasm> (totally promise, for realsies! Not even crossing my fingers behind my back when I say this...toootally) I use a lot of my writing as outlets for challenges and frustrations in my own life. Doesn't always apply, of course, but if you're careful, you'll be able to spot the places where there are not so subtle allegories to real-world problems, ones I'm usually only one of many people facing it.
No idea why I added that in, completely unrelated.
Totally.
11094347
..Fair enough, I supposs the internet has ruined another word. You win this time author..
:P
BEST CHRISTMAS PRESENT EVERRRRR🥰 THANK YOU FOR THE CHAPTER🙏 I love it and this made me cry that was so emotional for me especially the part where she sacrifice her last way communication to help her friends and he plea for at least being able to say that she love her mom one last time😭
11094322
11094351
Tell me about it, Ro. I didn't even get to finish the flashback before I got caught up in my own fix-it scenario.
Details are tl;dr but available on request in PMs. (Sorry other folks, offer only good for Princess and Ro.)
11094362
To be slightly fair to Harmony, it had no idea this universe would take its punishment, rip the soul out of it, and replace it with cold, hard, unfeeling ones and zeros.
11096354
It's called professional ethics, if you put a geas on someone you'd better be damn sure that you've got the cursed thing nailed down tightly. You let it take the bit in its teeth with loose interpretations or worse, unsupervised adaptive programming, and it's Ella Enchanted all over again.
This was criminal negligence, pure and simple. Can you sue a primordial spirit for malpractice?
11096458
It did! That's why the curse is being such a pain in the arse, it was nailed down extremely tight. It's just that Harmony did not expect the fundamental workings of the universe to completely shift around the moment its back was turned. Which, let's be fair, nobody expected. Even Sunset only knows this after the fact, and only because she is the first being ever to experience it first hand.
Though ironically, that same computer progammifying of the curse seems to be what allowed Celestia to free Sunset from it. The actual Harmonical curse would likely have recognized Celestia and just ignored her, if such interference was even needed to begin with. But this computer program curse was tied intrinsically to Sunset, and so when Celestia stepped in and declared she was not Sunset, the entire program just... blue-screened and crashed.
11096458
Never seen Ella Enchanted, sounds like I'm going to have to.
i1.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/397/441/35b.png
Venerable Ro, in the landmark case against of Shimmer vs. The Elements of Harmony, 2021, (colorized)
11096527
You nailed the exact plot points exactly from start to finish.
Something I alluded to in an earlier comment was the Elements malfunctioning being an allegory for stuff that happened in my own life. Without going into details, it involved some otherwise completely benign or even normally good things that are normal, everyday things for people turning into an awful trap that should never have happened in a just universe. Any one thing that happened to me that resulted in me being homeless was, in itself, not a problem, a non-issue, or in any other circumstance very, very good. But the whole of it caused a critical malfunction that nobody could have foreseen that had profoundly evil effects.
(Again, I'm not gonna go into it here, and probably not for a while)
Like so many things in my writing, I don't do these allegories on purpose, but in hindsight, I wind up wondering if it's heavy-handed or obvious.
I love seeing this kind of debate happening around my fics.
I get the whole "Celestia living Sunsets memories" thing, but uhhh...wtf is all this vampire hunting stuff?? Why is nobody else confused about this?
11097255
🎵Sombeody didn't read the canonical side-story Music Box Blues between Chapter 4 & 6🎶
100% serious, go read it now:
- MLP: FiM
- Equestria Girls
- MLP: Comic
- Drama
- Sad
Principal Celestia gets help from a completely unexpected source when trying to find a gift for Sunset Shimmer11097554
I can't believe Princess Columbia assigned me horse words homework.
derpicdn.net/img/view/2012/12/13/181753__safe_screencap_rainbow+dash_pegasus_pony_over+a+barrel_cropped_crossed+arms_female_grumpy_hub+logo_mare_solo+focus.png
11097776
You weren't planning on leaving your homework unfinished, were you?
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Word missing. Grammar broken.
Not confused.
16k words is a comfortable length for me to read in a few minutes time.
Mansfield, Massachusetts is where a company Pinkie would like got started: Honey Dew Donuts.
Dunkin' Donuts started in Quincy, MA.
11097554
If outside text is required reading to understand material introduced in a work, you as an author have not done your job.
(edit after reading the following chapter: The relevant details seem to have no import whatsoever to this story -- why bring it up at all?)
Interesting chapter. Not confusing, but perhaps somewhat bloated. Carry on.
We laugh at this, but there is a Humansville, Missouri.
11132726
Exactly! The scoffing at the name "Ponyville is almost as old as the Brony fandom, but humans do that kinda thing all the time! Glad I'm not the only one to notice.