I arrived in Canterlot.
Or what had once been Canterlot. The place was in ruins, the sun and moon were both in the sky, splitting it in half.
In the distance, the castle was burning.
“Where were you!?”
I turned quickly towards the voice. Midnight was in a circle of her friends. No… not only her friends. Hundreds of ponies, most I didn’t recognize.
It was Rarity that had spoken.
Midnight looked around, “I-I…”
“The princesses are dead and where were you!? Why didn’t you stop them!? We needed you!”
I couldn’t tell who said that, it was a pony to the back.
“I-I was-”
“Why did you abandon us?” Fluttershy asked her, “We needed you. When the Storm King came, we… we needed you. When the-”
They all started to yell, to demand and Midnight disappeared out of view as they pressed in on her from all directions.
Enough of this!
I stomped my hoof. A wall of light radiated away from the impact and where it passed, buildings returned to their whole state, the sky turning a clear blue and birds started to sing.
The angry ponies disappeared, leaving empty streets.
Midnight were laying on the cobblestone street, curled up and sobbing. I made my way over towards her.
She twitched at the sound of my hoofsteps against the stone and she looked up towards me, blinking in surprise, “...Page…” she said in surprise.
She looked… horrible. Her eyes red and tears stained down her cheeks.
“It’s not real,” I told her as I folded my wings, sitting down next to her.
She sniffled and shook her head, “But…”
“None of that,” I said, “It’s not real. Just your planet sized brain gathering what you know and turning it into a ‘what if’ with a good amount of self doubt and self blame. It is not what happened and it’s not what’s going to happen. And it’s not your fault, no matter what.”
Midnight slowly shook her head, slowly struggling up to sit before rubbing her eyes with her hoof, shaking her head, “...But it is my fault. If I had stopped her the first time, if we had caught Starlight back in her village, if I-”
I shook my head, “Stop that. Nopony is perfect, nopony can do everything. And nopony can see the future… I think.”
That earned me a look from her, “...You think?”
I nodded, “Yeah… never seen any evidence that it wasn’t possible, or then again, I haven’t seen proof that it wasn’t either. At least not definite. Then again, time travel clearly is, so… who knows?”
Midnight slowly nodded, looking thoughtful for a second before she looked to the side and it felt like the dream wanted to shift and I let it.
The elements appeared standing to the side. Rainbow Dash, Fluttershy, Applejack, Rarity and Pinkie Pie. Other ponies. A pair I recognized as Twilight's parents. Cadance was there. Shining Armor. Luna and Celestia. A dozen ponies I didn’t recognize.
Midnight looked to them for a long moment, her ears and wings drooping, “...I’m never going to see them again,” she said and shook her head, “...The ones from my world, I mean.”
“I don’t buy that,” I told her firmly, “You and Twilight are the smartest ponies I ever met. Followed by possibly Chrysalis or Celestia.”
Midnight looked to me in surprise, “Chrysalis?”
“Bug is crazy bright,” I said seriously, “She just doesn't think like a pony. But I don’t buy it that you’re stuck here permanently, I just don’t. If necessary, you’re capable of making a brand new spell to send you back.”
Midnight looked at me sadly for a long moment before she slowly shook her head, “...Page, it’s not that…” she said before she scraped her hoof against the stone of the street, “It’s not sending me somewhere that’s the problem. We can… it’s actually not that difficult. It’s what the portal we… it’s what the portal we made should have done. The difficult thing is to find the right timeline. Without some way to point out where I’m from, there are literally infinite possibilities.”
“Oh.”
Midnight nodded and glanced towards the group of ponies again, “The table was the only part that still remained, the only part that could be used to locate where I was from.”
“You and Spike remain, can’t you aim by… I don’t know, reading the quantum reality you’re from?”
I mean, it worked in Star Trek.
Midnight blinked at me and thought for a second, I could almost see the calculations going on behind her eyes before she finally shook her head, “...No, not sure what you mean by quantum reality, but no.” she said, “If we did it just after we arrived, maybe we could have used one of us to read what timeline we were from. But we've been here for well over a year now, too much of this timeline is in us now.”
“...Food, air and water!”
Midnight nodded sadly with a small sigh, “Exactly. By the start we didn’t have the spell and by the time we did, it was too late for that option. All we had was the table and now we don’t have that… and we don’t know what went wrong with the spell either,” and then she glanced at the dream images of her friends, “So no, Page. W-we’re never going home again,” she said, her voice starting to shake.
I moved up and pulled her into a hug, holding her close and she started to sob against my neck. I stroked her mane while I wished I could fix reality as easily as I could fix dreams.
Discord, you have so much to answer for.
Awesome update, literally got to it less than a minute after it was published, plz keep up the good work
I’ll never get accustomed to the frequent updates.
Good update
I'm surprised Page hasn't mentioned how much he understands her situation.
After all, he's stranded in this world too, due to no one knowing how to find his home world.
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Page is a lot more OK with being in this world than Midnight though
But again, the table is just cracked and destroyed, in pieces but not evaporated, right?
It should still be possible to use parts of it what's left to aim for the Midnight timeline
Twilight you don't know if someone from your own timeline is trying to find you.
Since her Celestia wants to retire lol:P
Don't give up hope too fast.
Discord: *shivering* There's that chill of promised pain again...I think it got stronger...
Cadance: I bet it is just my depression you felt. Like a black hole, it sucks everything in and I'm making things wooooorse! *returns more pathetic crying*
Shining Armor: Ah it is bad! DISCORD! Go and get the ponies from the Ponyville salon! The Princess needs an emergency pedicure and massage treatment!
Discord: RIGHT! *disappears and then reappears* You may be our only hope...Bulk Biceps!
Bulk Biceps: YEEEAH!
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Maybe....... better to rethink that
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Discord redirected a timestream to get Midnight here. I think he 'can help' but is not willing to help.
Repopulate with one Stallion and 6 Mares is hard enough. A singel mare might make the differance. Besides...
Discord seem to know the general direction timelines progress ! He probably chose this timeline over the other. For example - This writers Story Universes:
-Hivers
-Goldfur
-Vren55
-EmptyPlotFiller
-Elu
-Rust
-MaxBeezy
-LordBrony2040
-Zamairiac [Edit: Fine this twisted universe might not fit ]
They all have the main Ponys as characters of the story. Not everyone is needed to keep it running or we could guess they can compensate.
Your Discord now, Lord of Choas.
You have access to em all but have the choice to influence them to your liking ♡
Why not take a individual or two for one of your chose? You know the general direction of them so you know who needs help or rather who is expandebel for you.
Dont we all think at some point in time
" This character will be useful here or there, lets fix it ".
Like for agree and dislike to disagree. Please give a short answer. This would be quite the treat.
Teeth. Tooth enamel!
It annoys me in stories like this because the authors forget that tooth enamel isn't alive and teeth don't grow back.
“It’s fine Midnight I doubt the Storm King would have succeeded, he needed Four Alicorns to do...whatever he was doing.”
“...Flurry Hearts...”
“...Oh...right...well...shit.”
Now to just time travel to this timeline when they first arrived and snipe an energy reading.
Called it.
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Not necessarily true. If ponies are like earth equines, their teeth do in fact grow back. Though, considering the diets of ponies they eat far fewer grasses than our horses. This means that either their teeth grow back slower, or they are constantly grinding them down off screen.
Thanks for the new chapter! Looking forward to the update!
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It's not a time line that Midnight comes from, it's an OG alternate universe. The moment that Page came into this world, he created a small deviation between worlds; now if he'd gone on to live life as an everyday citizen, things would have gone on just as they have in the show. But NO, Luna interacted with him, which created an even larger deviation between his world and the main cannon.
Which as an end result, created what we now know of as the page verse.
SO the point I'm getting at, is that time and space travel are two different things in this instance, tho if you've watched back to the future 2, then you get an idea of how they both work.
But to explain a bit more. With time travel, your staying "within" the same world(ie universe), no matter if you go to the past to change the present or go into the future to see about changing something in the now.
But space, or I.E. universal travel in this instance, takes a whole level of another understanding. And for this, they really need the help of Star Swirl in making a mirror portal, or something equivalent. Or even just his research papers on the matter, because they need to break and or shimmy their way thru the vale.
An question Black soul, are you up to date with Gold Fur's, Well's verse?
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I was thinking a similar thing, have Midnight go back in time to the WHEN she arrived, cloaked in an invisibility spell. And at the point when the spell scroll would be destroyed, cast a small teleport which would replace it with a blank scroll, with the real scroll safely hidden away in her saddle bag. Leaving them non the wiser of what could be considered a paradox in the making.
I'm surprised that the Twilights haven't thought about time travellingback to right before the scroll was destroyed, and swapping it out.
Time travel got us into this mess, time travel will get us out!
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What's story,Midnight said
What you said
Also, the whole time travel, the alternative universe or even other things, change how they work and how to travel between, like in Avengers.There they also talked about back to the future and other movies with time travel .
You can pretty much throw away mechanics,rules of time travel of back to the future movies ,similar movies, and other movies with time travel from "canon for other worlds time travel" or "works in every world" bin.
Hmm. I always wondered. Currently the Table was set at the tree library, right? All the rest of the timelines she popped out of the Table was relative to where the Crystal Tree Castle should have been. Meaning her table isn't aligned with the other tables. Did she compensate for this fact when she attempted the spell, or does it even matter?
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Cannon wise, the time spell known can only let them stay for a short period of time before they are sent back to their time. So only enough time for a short message, nothing more.
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Rereading Goldfurs Masterpiece but im up to date. Magnificent adventure. They not travel simply trough time but also universes... So far Starlight glimmer was beside Grogar the most Apocalypse inducing villain...
10394591
Clever solution. That got almost Dr. Who level genius. Key time moment must pass but with a sharp mind it still can be exploited.
Not sure if anyone has said it yet but there is a second table. I don't recall reading about them opening the chest in Pages timeline yet. Unless I seem to have missed that occurrence. Seems that would be the next go to if all the tables are interconnected somehow. Just food for thought.
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I guess I should have mentioned that the Twilight's in the story have it all wrong.
They know and or figure that the spell scroll only dealt in time, when in fact this may only be a 50/50 chance. Black soul gets what I mean, and I'm not spoiling the Well's verse.
But now besides that and why I figure their wrong, is because I take it that they presume that Discord only broke a tear in time, (IE) they have not consulted him on this matter; which is just like the brainiacs to assume there's nothing he can do or suggest to help like always.
10394591 Indeed
10394635 Time to get Glim Glam on the case.~
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Cool, was just checking to know we'er on the same page.
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They have not attained cutey mark table status yet, as is they haven't yet had need of it, mostly because Page has been a very strong force of deviation from cannon.
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Was that a pun? Because i love it
10394927
Maaaaaayby~
10394635
even with that 5 minute time travel spell its still enough to say...pickup the pieces of the spell parchment before they get wrecked
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You are assuming that the spell lets you take past stuff to your present.
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Never try to use time travel to fix time travel. You'll only compound the issue.
Her horn hasn't changed. That portion of her horn that grew in her timeline is still the same. It hasn't changed. The same goes for the shoes she would have been wearing.
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Not on a macro level, yeah, but on a microscopic level? Hard to say. It depends on what exactly they’re reading to measure her “quantum reality” and how much. If her horn works like our fingernails do, then older parts of her horn would have been filed off over time (horn filings are a thing in the mlp universe’s massage parlors, right?), and the living tissue part of it would have slowly died and been replaced/replicated like any other cell.
On an even more microscopic level, the smallest particles (atoms, electrons, muons, etc) would have shifted their positions relative to each other ever so slightly, and the energy levels of each particle within it wouldn’t be the same as when she first got here. Radiation from the sun and other radioactive objects in Page’s universe (fire, etc) would have interacted with her horn, causing it to heat up and cool off, and random energetic particles would have collided with the particles that make up her horn, ever so slightly changing its structure.
Same thing would apply to any clothing or inanimate objects they had, which is why them having been able to use the table is so strange to me. It would have changed in the months since she’s arrived! Was there some sort of magical property to it? Otherwise why can’t they use it now that it’s been partially melted? Iirc there are still intact parts of it remaining.
Sooo many things they could probably do (use the dream realm or Discord to make an exact copy of the time scroll’s spell using her memories, for instance) but there are probably magical complexities going on that Page/Midnight aren’t telling us that make that not possible
Discord needs a metal baseball bat to the face, multiple times. So far he hasn't done a single good thing in this story. So far he's caused naught but pain and suffering.
10995289
What about restoring Tempest's horn?
11340483
Double edged sword on that one. Or maybe triple edged?
He did restore her horn. But only did it in exchange for turning Page into a bat.
Though I DO suspect his reasons for that particular choice was to get Page to do the things he is now trying to do for thestrals. Probably specifically for Flutters sake.
Meanwhile the comment section: 100+ ideas on how to send her back…
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Couldn't Discord make an EXACT copy of the scroll she arrived with? An EXACT copy of before it was destroyed. Less finding her timeline and more "It's About Time" shenanigans
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To simpel and not enough Chaos in return ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
11608979
True but we are not the Author. The Author can make some all powerful or the biggest wimp to have ever existed. Making or breaking the logic? Author choice
(σ ͜ʖσ)
10411716
Never even considered THAT problem...
Dear God... The comment section is priceless.
Unfortunately not all links work anymore.
Finally, another Star Trek reference. "Parallels" is one of my favorite episodes of TNG. I'll never forget how cool I thought it was the first time I saw that entire fleet of Enterprise-Ds.
One would think that it'd be easy to match Twi's quantum signature with that of another reality, but then again, that would be too convenient.
Ohh that make sense
This chapter, the comment section in general, the ideas both give...
Did Discord plan this all along? Even partially?
He would be indeed a master chess player.