Disclaimer: I am not Lauren Faust nor Hasbro. I do not own My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, nor Equestria Girls.
Opening Note:
See the opening note of the 'preludes.'
This chapter concerns ERAFOSS Twilight Sparkle, and is from her perspective. Keep in mind that Discord has just won, and ERAFOSS Twilight Sparkle is in the process of hitting rock-bottom. This chapter, and several of the further early ones will be rough going on some of the characters. The tide of Discord's triumph is still rising strongly, and the heroes and heroines are running around doing damage control or in dungeons or in pieces.
Warning:
As noted in the preludes, this piece is rated 'M'.
Chapter One:
Twilight Sparkle was falling end over end through space, the mocking laughter of Discord still ringing in her head.
She'd packed her suitcase with the Element of Magic and a few precious books about Star Swirl and some other personal items, ignored the scrolls that Spike was burping out all over the floor, and just run. Or teleported – she hadn't cared to where; to anywhere so long as it was as far away from Ponyville, capital of chaos, as possible.
And Spike had flung himself desperately at her, as she'd gone, sensing that she was just getting out – and away.
And something strange was happening to Twilight's body as she tumbled end over end through a shaft of purple light. Through a shaft of purple light which pierced and conveyed Twilight – with Spike and her suitcase trailing in her slipstream – through clouds of swarming shadows to somewhere else. Twilight had lost control of her body and what was happening to it, and of the teleport, too, which was conveying her away from Ponyville and to who knew where?
And then there was something like ground rushing up to meet her, with grass – real grass, and not like what she had left behind in Ponyville – and then a blast, and a crater, with Twilight lying grey and numb at the bottom.
She could hear Spike whimpering nearby.
The purple light faded.
Something was badly wrong with her body. Maybe the fall had broken it.
Twilight just lay there.
She could hear voices, and could see monsters approaching. Horrible, ungainly monsters, which cruelly spoke with the voices of the friends that she had lost, taken from her and twisted into mockeries of their former inner selves by Discord. And made grey, like Twilight had become. Only these monsters weren't grey.
Twilight hurt, from the fall. And the betrayals, and the knowledge that she had failed all of Equestria, handing it over to Discord with her own weakness and stupidity.
Somepony else should have been in her position. Somepony who wouldn't have failed.
And as the taunting voices of Twilight's once-friends gathered around her, in the bodies of strange monsters, Twilight felt oddly comforted and reassured, and as if a bit of colour was slowly washing back into her. She couldn't see any sign of the curtains and shrouds of shadows that she'd hurtled through on the way here, but this place felt like it was a long way from Discord's gaze. She was incapable of feeling that it mattered much at all but 'escape Discord' was temporarily accomplished.
But then she blacked out.
Twilight Sparkle woke up.
She was in a bed somewhere and ached still, all over. Mentally she felt just numb right now. The monsters who had been with her in the crater were here, and after a few moments Twilight realised that she had turned into a monster – physically, at any rate, from what she could see of herself.
Her beautiful pony limbs and torso had been warped into something else, and she was certain that she didn't have a horn or a tail any more.
Her horn! How was she supposed to do magic without her horn?
"Are you okay?" a monster which sounded like Applejack asked.
Peering at her, Twilight made out that despite the other obvious physical differences, the speaker did in fact seem to have Applejack's coloration in skin tone and hair colour.
"Where am I?" Twilight asked. "What is this place?"
"This is the school infirmary at Canterlot High." the thing which sounded like Applejack before Discord had gotten his claws into her said. "You, uh, fell out of the sky in a flash of purple light about an hour ago, just as school was finishing for the day, and made quite a crater in the ground."
"I told them that you're a refugee who fled here from an alternate universe inhabited by talking ponies, but they thought that I was joking." a thing which sounded like Pinkie Pie said. "They always think I'm joking when I say things like that."
Twilight adjusted her position to look at the new speaker the better. Like the Applejack thing which had Applejack's voice, this one had Pinkie Pie's coloration.
Twilight looked at the other three things in the room, and noticed that they shared the colorations of Rarity, Rainbow Dash, and Fluttershy.
'Alternate universe?' Twilight's brain processed that thought for a few moments. Might that be where she now was? It was possible that there might be other realities which contained distorted versions of inhabitants of Equestria. Maybe even distorted versions of 'places', if this location was called 'Canterlot High'.
"Is there anyone here called Princess Celestia?" Twilight asked.
"Principal Celestia." the Rarity thing said in Rarity's voice. "Along with her sister, Vice-Principal Luna, she runs this school."
So either Twilight was dead and this was some kind of afterlife, or it was some kind of weird at least partially parallel world.
"What about," Twilight steeled herself, "someone or something called 'Discord'?"
The others exchanged blank looks for a few moments.
"I think there may be some kind of popular plushy children's toy called 'Discord'." the Fluttershy thing said.
"Are you really some kind of weird alien spy from another world, like Pinkie says?" the Rainbow Dash thing asked Twilight.
"Refugee." the Pinkie Pie thing corrected. "There is a crucial difference."
"I think so. Maybe." Twilight said, cutting off a possible argument, as the Rainbow Dash thing opened her mouth to respond. "Are your names Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie, Applejack, Rarity, and Fluttershy?"
"How did you know that?" the Applejack thing asked Twilight, looking astonished.
Twilight hesitated, not sure how or indeed if she wanted to answer that one.
"Pinkie?" the Rarity thing looked to the Pinkie Pie thing. "Since your amusing stories seem to be grounded in fact for once?"
"I got nothing." Pinkie Pie (darn it – Twilight was just going to drop the whole 'thing' business in thinking about them) said. "Or nothing good that I want to say. If she knew ponies we remind her of and she's here as a refugee and they're not… well something bad happened. That's not me just making a wild guess. That's logic." She sounded sad for once, which was weird to Twilight to hear coming from any Pinkie Pie, and apparently the others by the look of their expressions didn't expect it from this one. Then Pinkie Pie's tone changed. "But we got to get going, ladies, since Sunset Shimmer is going to want to see her."
"Who?" Twilight asked.
"She's – uh – a very important figure in our year." Applejack said. "Not exactly the nicest girl, but not a person you want to cross either."
"By the way: we brought your doggie in with you, and he's asleep by the foot of your bed." Fluttershy said, as the other girls started to get ready to make tracks.
Doggie? Twilight sat up, and looked harder, and there was a purple and green dog there, with coloration that strongly reminded her of Spike. What looked like Twilight's suitcase, looking a lot more battered than it had been when she left… Ponyville… but still intact was there beside the bed too.
Well, if something weird had happened to Twilight, maybe it had happened to Spike too.
Sunset Shimmer arrived just as the five were departing. From the looks of dislike that they exchanged, it was apparent that the group and Sunset didn't entirely see eye-to-eye. A brief nod and civil glower of "Afternoon, Sunset." trotted out from Applejack to the newcomer confirmed her identity to Twilight though.
Sunset managed a civil-with-ice-in-it. "Good afternoon, Applejack." in response, then closed the door behind the departing five, adjusted the furniture, and made herself comfortable in a chair next to Twilight's bed.
"Snips and Snails are outside making sure that nobody but matron will disturb us or try to spy." Sunset said. Like the others and like Twilight herself now, Sunset looked like a weird bipedal humanoid thing. She had striped red and blonde hair; a skin tone that didn't remind Twilight of any ponies that she knew; and there was something curiously intense about her. Snips and Snails had been the names of a couple of ponies who'd been fans of Trixie when she came to Ponyville, though. "Whatever you say to me will not go any further unless I decide that it will." Sunset continued. "Are you from Equestria?"
"Yes." Twilight said. She noticed Sunset hadn't either introduced herself to Twilight, nor expected Twilight to do so. And… 'Equestria'… Was this actually another pony she was talking to, or someone who had met one?
"How did you get here? Why did you come here?" Sunset asked.
"Who are you and why do you want to know?" Twilight shot back. Something about Sunset was needling Twilight, sufficiently, that despite her sense of exhaustion and emptiness inside, she wanted to assert herself a bit.
Sunset ran an appraising eye over Twilight and then shrugged.
"This world works differently from Equestria in lots of ways. I have to be careful about some things. But connections back to Equestria aren't exactly regular and I'm always curious about what's going on back there and anyone else coming to a place as remote as this. I'm Sunset Shimmer. I was a student back in the version of the school in Equestria that the Equestrian version of Principal Celestia here ran. A star student. Your turn. How did you get here and why did you come here?"
"Well, I was a star student at that school too." Twilight said. "And…" she wanted to say 'I never heard of you', but then she hadn't exactly paid any attention to the names of former star students unless they were in the magical history books for great achievements. "… I just came here by magic. I just wanted to get away. Anywhere. As far away as possible. I was… Discord… I was supposed to… stop him… and I failed… completely." She felt utterly humiliated and dejected. Some star student she'd turned out to be…
"Discord?" Sunset looked utterly horrified. "The Lord of Chaos? He's loose, back in Equestria? No! That can't be right! You have to be wrong! There must have been a mistake!"
"She's not." Spike stirred now and spoke. "I was there. We tried to use the Elements of Harmony, after he stole them, but we played his stupid game and got them back, but the Elements didn't work, and so that was that. Twilight packed and we left and came here. She magicked us here. And Discord's probably in charge and spreading his stupid chaos halfway to Canterlot by now."
"And who are you?" Sunset's attention switched to Spike.
"Spike. Dragon and trusted companion assigned to Twilight here by her Royal Highness, Princess Celestia, herself." Spike said. "Or, uh, 'former dragon' I guess under the circumstances."
"You talk? Fascinating." Sunset said. "Dogs don't here. You may like to be careful of that, depending on company." She seemed to be saying it for something to do, whilst she struggled to recover her mental balance, Twilight thought, wearily. The news about Discord seemed to have struck her particularly hard. Sunset's attention switched back to Twilight. "You magicked yourself here, blindly? That's… pretty impressive stuff. Star Student stuff."
"Probably." Twilight said sourly. She didn't particularly care about that right now. "It got us away."
"I came here a year and a bit ago by probably much less dramatic means than you." Sunset carried on. "Given how different things are here, some of it was very difficult to deal with at first. And some of it – like not having anyone to talk with about stuff 'from back home' is still very frustrating and difficult." She paused, and seemed to be thinking, struggling to make some kind of decision. And then she grimaced. "But you have a huge advantage of course."
"What?" Twilight asked.
"Me." Sunset said. "I'm here already, and can try to help you. If you want." And she actually tried to smile.
It was not the smile of someone who looked as if they had tried to do it much, recently, Twilight thought, but as far as she was any judge, it was a smile at least worth marks for tremendous effort.
"Thanks." Twilight said, coolly.
"Principal Celestia and Vice-Principal Luna are good sorts, who will probably like you, and would probably offer you a place at their school here." Sunset said, sounding like she was busily thinking and planning. "They might be able to help with accommodation and funding… Hmm. I wonder if they could arrange for you to stay with me? And… But: manners, manners, manners." She held out a hand (at least that was what the appendage on the end of an 'arm' was called when someone like a minotaur had it), open and held vertically, to Twilight. "I am Sunset Shimmer, former star student of Princess Celestia."
This must be some local version of a formal hoof-bump, Twilight figured. She looked Sunset in the eyes and saw things there. Someone on a knife-edge between light and darkness, struggling one way and then another. And whose mere aura of presence in this moment might very well have been that of a one-time star student of Princess Celestia.
Twilight didn't care about light and darkness right now. But Sunset genuinely looked like she wanted to help. And something inside of Twilight, which Discord had done his very worst in trying to cripple and maim and hobble, desperately wanted to be rescued at this moment.
Twilight extended a (probable) hand of her own, in a similar orientation to Sunset's, and Sunset did a close hand motion, and Twilight instinctively did the same and… it was weird, but it was establishing a connection between them.
"Twilight Sparkle." Twilight said. "Former star student of Princess Celestia." And Sunset looked a mixture of terrified and relieved, and they were doing this 'up-down' motion' with grasped hands, which pulled Sunset slightly towards Twilight, and then they released hands and looked and both felt slightly surprised.
"Welcome to Dôn. Oh, that's the name of this world." Sunset said.
Author Notes:
ERAFOSS Twilight Sparkle in this story has arrived at Canterlot High more than a year ahead of the first Equestria Girls film. Therefore, Sunset Shimmer has a year less of moral decline behind her (and from those pictures on the wall we see of Sunset in the first Equestria Girls film, it seems to me that the original creators intend us to believe that there was an ongoing downward spiral that Sunset became locked into whilst she was in her early years at Canterlot High), and Sunset has not yet engaged in activities such as sabotaging the friendship of (human) Applejack/Fluttershy/Pinkie Pie/Rainbow Dash/Rarity.
There will be more on the Sunset Shimmer perspective, from Sunset's own point of view, in the next chapter.
(Human) Pinkie Pie I am assuming to have been saying 'Pinkie Pie' things ever since she started at Canterlot High, but with a very low verifiable accuracy rate up until now, as far as her friends are concerned. She just makes up fantasies and says the 'first thing which comes into her head'. Even Pinkie Pie herself doesn't necessarily believe them, and it's something of a surprise to her when what she says about ERAFOSS Twilight Sparkle is apparently at least partially confirmed by Twilight.
The shrouds of shadow which ERAFOSS Twilight plummeted through on her way to the human world are there courtesy of my expansion of the background of the human world and of one of the characters developed for it. They're a blanket of spells and enchantments with various effects including shutting down most 'incoming' scrying and divination attempts. Someone really, really, doesn't want the human world getting magical observation attention. From a narrative point of view, amongst other things they prevent Discord from going 'Peekabo: found you, Twilight!' within half an hour of ERAFOSS Twilight departing Ponyville. The human world actually is a relatively safe place to hide in terms of Discord not being able to magically locate a character there from outside.
In the original The Return of Harmony TV show episodes, Twilight Sparkle bins the Element of Magic, after the first failure to re-statue Discord, but then reads the friendship scrolls Princess Celestia sends back to her. Here, ERAFOSS Twilight Sparkle packed the Element of Magic in her suitcase, but ignored the friendship scrolls Spike was burping across the floor.
ERAFOSS Twilight Sparkle's 'greyness' fading upon her crashlanding in the human world might be a result of being cut off from Equestria and Discord on a different world, might be a result of the shapeshift, might be a result of different rules of magic in the human world, or could be due to being briefly surrounded by the human counterparts of the ponies who betrayed her in a friendly manner. Or it could be down to something else altogether that I haven't considered yet.
For the record, the trip between worlds is assumed to have severed Princess Celestia's 'mail link' with (dragon-turned-doggie) Spike.
ERAFOSS Twilight Sparkle is still numb with shock in this chapter, over what has happened, and the awfulness of what's psychologically and emotionally been done to her has not quite yet fully hit home. That's going to come in the next chapter which is from her point of view. (As I said in the opening notes things are going to be rough on some of the characters in these first few chapters.) If only there were another star-student unicorn-pony around good (even without a Camp Everfree powerup) at figuring out what was going on inside others' heads, with time to devote to helping ERAFOSS Twilight… (And maybe also a wise authority figure interested in helping others battle their personal nightmares.)
Also for the record, it is not my intention to romantically ship ERAFOSS Twilight with Sunset Shimmer. Any bond which develops between them will be of a different kind.
Omake:
(The setting is the magical limbo in between worlds, with (human) Sombra and Discord confronting one another.)
Discord: Well, poot, that didn't work. So let me know what I want, or else I challenge you to an epic rap battle!
(Human) Sombra: Challenge accepted.
Discord: Wait, what, you weren't supposed to do that, but since…
(Human) Sombra: And since you challenged me, and we're in breaking-the-fourth-wall territory here, I name Indigo Zap and her friend Lemon Zest as my champions.
Indigo Zap: materialises Bring it, slug features!
Lemon Zest: materialises; adjusts headphones and meaningfully flexes fingers, smiling
Discord: Uh, Pinkie Pie, some help here?
(Pony) Pinkie Pie: materialises I splat things for you. Type five demons and changelings. And tell ponies too-dumb-to-live but who aren't expendable-mook-minions and are actually-useful-to-us to run away really fast from stuff like hunting haystacks. I don't do rap battles these days.
Lemon Zest: makes beatbox sounds
Indigo Zap: rapping There's this guy named Discord who's a total fool…
Discord: No, no, I surrender. I'll just go away quietly and come up with another plan to find her.
(Human) Sombra, Indigo Zap and Lemon Zest: high five one another
