DISCLAIMER! I will do something a little wild (10 points for amazing punnery) and do a sort of strange thing. I will do two different story-lines aaand, that's all you need to know for now. If you want to see the alternate timeline you can jump to chapter 3 (as soon as I upload it), and from then on you should follow the instructions to follow the plot(s). I feel like this is a nice way to individualize my work and also dig in some theories regarding the newly released episode "Mathmagic".Thank you for reading, and enjoy!"
"Look, I know you hate me, but if you want to live, you'd better trust me on this one and jump in here!"
Scott's yells were seemingly covered by the sound of crumbling rock, falling trees and the ripping of the space-time fabric all around them. Marco, however seemed to clearly understand those words and actually responded to them:
"No, this is the last straw! This day, I did nothing but take leaps of faith with you and you, as usual, gave no explanations for any of them. I don't know where Star or Jackie are and neither do you, and we'll probably die in this next world. It's a surprise that we've made it this far. You know, at first I thought you were different, but you are just as reckless as Star is."
Scott was impassable as usual, but his words seemed to be the first thing to touch him in the least. He didn't seem mad, or angry in any way, but rather disappointed and sorry for what he did. Still, he had no will for revenge in his voice, but instead he shakily exclaimed:
"Okay, here is a pair of dimensional scissors," he said, throwing him a purple pair of scissors." Don't worry about Hekapoo, she won't be bothering you should you use these, which is the least of your concerns right now. It's true, I don't know where I've sent the girls, but they are alive and well, I assure you…" He averted his eyes, and then finished his speech with a heavy sigh. "Good luck, Marco."
And with these last words, he stepped into the portal leaving the boy all alone in a self-destroying world. What happened that lead to these events? Well…
The morning sun had crushed any hopes of sleeping in late. That and the fact that Scott was outside from the crack of dawn, doing God knows what for about three hours, undeterred. However, when the noise was getting insufferable, a Warnicorn Stampede, invaded the back yard in an attempt to tackle the problem at its roots. Seeing that it didn't do anything, but actually aggravated the issue, Star went to the balcony to see it for herself.
"WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU DOING THIS EARLY?" She yelled to the oblivious boy who transformed a back yard in an amazing construction site.
"Good morning to you too, Star."
The girl proceeded to jump the ledge and use her wand to slow her descent. She landed on the ground, wetting her socks on the dew doused grass.
"What's all the fuss about," an up and at them Marco intervened.
"Marco! He violated the sacred protocol of Late-Sleeping Saturday!" Star yelled, then continued in a vengeful whisper: "He. Must. Pay."
"Oh, walk it off…I've been awake for about two hours now," Marco said without climbing aboard the Scott hate-train.
"Why?" the other boy asked, seeming that somehow he knew the answer.
"Oh, well I'm going to help Jackie with her math homework, because I am the only one in class who actually pays attention. So, without any further ado, I am off!" Marco proudly admitted as he took his leave.
"Hold on, if you're only now leaving, why did you wake up this early?" Scott asked, smiling devilishly on the inside.
"Oh, well…" he said scratching the back of his head. "I was too excited!" he finished with a short girly giggle, after which he set off to Jackie's.
During this time, Star was inadvertently changing faces, looking visibly dismayed, then annoyed, then straight up filled with sorrow. She had not realized how Scott was doing this on purpose, while still performing his mindless task of doing whatever he was doing to annoy them. After he left, Star finally stopped her strangely forced smile and, with a loud sigh, she let go of her emotions…Scott wasn't a man of feelings, therefore he absently asked:
"Can you help me?"
"How am I supposed to do that?" she answered, shaking her head, trying to get her mind off something.
"Well, you can either create a portal, or you can summon a random thing, it's your choice."
"Ok, drop the act. Now that Marco isn't here I can finally ask you some things."
"Fire away," Scott continued in his usual manner.
"First of all, how do you know all these? You kinda evaded this the other day…"
"It is my duty to know everything, Star. Although you have messed with time and space…and space-time before, and you have a pair of dimensional scissors, but still, even though you had explored many dimensions… You have yet to explore different universes. To use a metaphor, imagine that this piece of cake is the universe," he said creating an enormous cake before Star's eyes. She reached out to grab a bite, hypnotized by the apparent deliciousness of the pastry.
"Here," he said cutting a slice for her. "Now, as you can see we have here many different layers, but in the end they only create one singular slice. When you travel between dimensions, you're only switching the place you bite from…"
"I love biting from different places," Star innocently remarked.
"I hope, you understand the concept. Now, imagine this. The layers are the same wherever you'd cut the cake from, therefore, in every single slice there would be a Star, a Marco, a Jackie, a Janna… but they wouldn't be cooked the same. A part might be burnt, the other might be filled with syrup and so on. My point is that even though the characters are the same, their interactions might be different. Also, there might be differences between the layers as well. Now, the layers are different dimensions and the characters inhabiting them… but the different slices are actually different universes…"
"Say wha…?" the girl said with a mouthful of cake.
"Now, this is a concept called infinitely large number of infinities… It's something not even the smartest Mewnians, Monsters, Humans or whatever species you want to think of cannot wrap their head around. I know you're confused, but please just keep on listening. Once, the pieces were cut, there is no way to link them back or put them together again, right? Well, I made that happen. I am not from another dimension, as you are to Earth, I am from another universe altogether."
"Whoa…" she said, her eyes glimmering with amazement. Snapping out of it, she continued: "But that still doesn't answer my question."
"Look, do you think that a being who has made travel between worlds possible can't know about a crush or two?"
"Humph, agreed," she answered rolling her eyes. „Second question, how come do you have magic powers, and use them without a wand?"
"How old, do you think I am?" He asked absently.
"I don't know, fourteen, fifteen, I'm not good with numbers…"
"I am actually, incommensurably old. Every time I jump from one universe to another I revert to a younger state. Every single time, I turn from fourteen to twelve, from thirty to twenty and so on. Therefore, I had more than enough time to learn everything there was to learn. Including magic…"
"Okay, I've got to listen to Glossaryck more…" she said disappointed. "Okay, now last question…" Star continued returning to the high spirits she usually was in. "Why are you here, exactly?"
"Ook, for this I actually need to stop my multi-tasking. Look," he said standing down on a bench that appeared from thin air. "You know that cake metaphor? There are actually more cakes… an all of them are in a pastry shop, and all the pastry shops are in an industrial area, and more areas are in one city, and more cities are in a county and so on… There are infinity to the power infinity things like this, Star, this breaks the mind of everyone… And still, there are limits to that. There is one point, in which it all stops, in which infinity ceases to exist… That's the point where I was sent from… I am sent to balance out everything… There are places in which evil reigns, places in which good reigns and places in which the fight is still undecided. Lately, in the last cycles of life, evil was pretty much in the lead… Therefore, I must help you win in order to even the odds once again."
"My head hurts…I'm just gonna go spy on Marco," she said joyfully taking her leave.
"I am afraid I can't let you do that, Star…"
"And what you're gonna do about it?" she replied in a snarky tone, starting to cast her spell.
"Okay, give me that…" He rose up to his feet, trying to grab the wand and stop her. However, Star was not one to give up without a fight, and whilst the two wrestled, she casted bits of the spell, scrambled along… The effect of which was pretty surprising… And what was more surprising was the fact that Scott, didn't know what happened either. The All-Seeing Eye seemed a bit…off. It showed the whereabouts of a Marco and a Jackie, but they were seemingly different from what the two were known as…
"What did you do?" Scott asked visibly starting to get panicked.
"I don't know! But it seems it worked out, so what's the problem?"
"Ummm, what is wrong… hmm let me see. Marco has white hair, Jackie has black hair with a red strand, they wear literally negative colors of what they usually wear, and they are doing literature homework. Doesn't this sound like a polar opposite to where we are now? What I am saying is that you created a portal to another timeline…or "dimension" as you prefer to call it."
"So, what's the matter with me doing that?"
"Well… we should be experiencing troubles…" he started to count down looking at his watch. "Three. Two. One…" And right on cue, a strong earthquake shook the ground beneath them, causing the two to fall from their feet.
"Great… you've managed to destabilize our world… I shouldn't have told you my origin story… Come, we need to fix this up, before this whole thing blows out of proportion and the High Magic Council will be all over you."
"Okay, I am good at fixing up my mistakes. Where do we start?"
"Step into this portal, as long as I still can create them and let's go…"
"Can you fill me in on what happened?"
"If only I knew exactly… I'm just going on a guess at the moment."
"That…seems... to be an amazing idea!" Star yelled while jumping head first in the portal. Scott followed suit and the two of them were now in the same room as their universe's Marco and Jackie's doorstep.
"Great, we're in front of the house, what now?"
"We get in, grab the two and retreat to another dimension, who should not be crumbling…"
"Okay, let me knock!" Star said with a smile, as Scott was worryingly looking in the distance, seeking something that was weird… After a few swift knocks, Jackie got the door, with Marco peering in from behind her, sitting down on an ocean green sofa. As soon as they saw her, they both focused their attention to creating a portal to a possibly safe layer of reality.
"What's up?" Jackie asked in her usual monotone way.
"No time to explain, dimension breaking stuff, gotta grab Marco and get out of here," Star nonchalantly blurted out as she pushed Marco through the portal, to which he replied with an offended "Hey!" She then stepped in, grabbing Jackie as well leaving Scott alone in the room to step up inside last, and shut down the hole in the reality. The first thing the inter-dimensional traveler noticed was… the unfortunate state of the place they were in.
"Okay this place's got the crumbles as well, what do we do?" Star asked sounding a bit down.
"I told you, we just continue to jump through dimensions until we find a stable one. This one's bad, go to the next one! "
Marco was freaking out, Star was tearing the hole with her dimensional scissors, Jackie was sitting confused trying to get a grasp of the situation, and Scott was pretending to be completely unaffected, even though he was severely shook, his calm calculated self, evading him in these moments. However, his lack of implication was not near as obnoxious as Marco's annoying interrogation. Especially when this was happening while passing through dimensions.
"Okay, what in the world is going on, here?"
"Oh, Star just opened the wrong kind of All…"
"Port-All," she intervened in order to conceal her actual intentions.
"Right…portal, which instead of looking through different levels of the same reality, she opened a portal to another universe…"
"Wait…" Marco started asking for explanations, but he was interrupted by the other boy's nervous, yet determined cry:
"I don't have time for this, right now Marco! All in due time!"
"Yeah, can you make an exception for this situation? "
"Fine! That's because I don't think I'm going to have any work done with you constantly complaining…" While these words came out of his mouth, he already stepped through a portal. Marco followed him:
"Great, what happened?" he asked. After taking a deep breath, Scott signaled he prepared for an enormous line of speech.
"Okay, Star opened a portal to another universe instead of another dimension, so when the two collided, even though we didn't step through the portal, it caused a fatal error in our own world, so now everything is destabilized. However, since the exposure was extremely short, we will eventually find a place untainted, and if you wonder why are you all here, since on the other side of the portal there was an exact replica of you and Jackie, all the parts implied in both universes have to be removed from the point of the interaction. All clear?"
"Pretty much…"
The dimension they were in now was a cave, filled with still destroying time-space fabric. The entire place was falling apart, still, and Scott inexplicably stopped. He didn't offer any explanation, he just halted the entire "trip".
"Hello, Mr. Travel? Mind hurrying up a bit? We are about to die, in here, unless we get a move on."
"No, we may die if we go on another random dimension, because it may have already been destroyed, which in turn will kill us too. Let me figure out where we should go next, then we can go ok?"
"But, isn't this cave already, like, being blasted?" Jackie asked.
"It will last long enough to let me check my book. You see, when something is destroyed, the wave of death and sorrow extends in both directions like…a regular wave. So, if the next jump is to one of the furthest away lands, we should be fine."
Without talking more, Scott pulled a small notebook from one of his coat pockets and started studying it, putting literally all his attention into that. While, he was locked in his thought-bubble, he could spare no focus to anything else but his study. Star, Marco and Jackie were watching the literal bubble in which he encased himself, with a mix of surprise and awe.
"So what should we do while Scott figures out where should we go?" Jackie asked in a rather concerned, yet still bland voice.
"Look, Star, I know your mother had sent this guy here for your own good…perhaps. But, since this guy came, we have firstly came close to any actual danger. Ludo was bad, and Toffee was worse, but this guy is really close to killing us."
"Marco…this is my fault…"
"I don't believe that. He must've done something to you."
"He actually did nothing," Star said starting to blush all of a sudden. "Why are you so bent on hating him?"
She couldn't get an answer… All of a sudden, the earth shaking intensified, causing bigger rocks to fall from the ceiling and the walls to crumble. This was a clear sign that this layer they were in is close to being completely deleted from the cake, but the un-bubbled trio had no idea of that. As time went by, the magnitude of the quakes grew, until it became worryingly obvious that the place they were in would collapse any second. A stalactite dropped on top of Scott's bubble, digging hard into it, only to bounce right off and almost hit Marco, who froze in place at the sight of the rock bullet that lodged hard into the cave's wall. However, involuntarily, that stalactite served as an accelerator to the cave's literal downfall. A crack in the stone quickly ran its way up the spiky ceiling, causing the ancient formations to violently shake, signaling their swift fall that would happen. Unfortunately, the general atmosphere prevented the aforementioned protagonists from seeing the imminent danger.
With a distinctively large crack, a large portion of the stalactites dislodged and began its deadly descent towards the three. Star grabbed her wand, but in an instant the world paused around her. She thought of the possible outcomes. An immense rock was bound to crush all three of them, unless she blasted them off. She couldn't have done that, even with her most powerful attack, and she could've only saved herself…But she could blast someone else out of the way and save…him. With a heavy heart, she Narwhal Blasted Marco out of the way, leaving her and Jackie to be impaled…
And that leads us to the beginning…Marco had torn a hole through the 1% of dimension that still remained standing and without thinking where to go, he woke up in front of a castle resembling that of Star's Mewnipendance Day reenactment book. Surprisingly this plane was surprisingly unscathed and didn't seem to be destroyed any time soon. This was a great place to rest.
Meanwhile, Star and Jackie were unscathed in the Pixie world…As the sharp stalactites were about to pierce their brains, a portal opened beneath them and sucked them in, throwing them on a small grassy hill, bathed by sunlight, and free of any signs of crumbling. They were safe…
In the meantime, Scott had gone to yet another dimension, appearing just above Glossaryck's book. He opened it at the exact page he was sound asleep, and shook him awake.
"Oh, Scott, hello," he said drowsly.
"How are things going, old friend?"
"Amazing. As you can see, I am no longer in the possession of the Butterfly family."
"I noticed, but unfortunately, you know, I can't retrieve the book to Star."
"And I unfortunately, am forced to help Ludo, who has been possessed by Toffee."
"This place is the most broken I've been to so far… And unfortunately it's my last."
"You have fulfilled your purpose?"
"Yes. I believe you know of the lies I told Star, right?"
"They got to her head and her imagination did the rest, leading to that tremor in the whole piece of cake, yes, I know. Just be careful, those alternate dimensions Stars you had taught are nothing like…this Star. You'll be needing a lot of patience."
"I am only fourteen, yet I've done more than any human at my age."
"You know, I am still surprised of how you were able to learn magic… Yet again I am surprised of many things concerning you… Even your level of power is astounding, but still your humbleness baffles me. How did you manage that, by the way?"
"All in due time, old man. All in due time."
And with those words, Scott had retreated into the portal leaving Glossaryck to his calm beauty sleep.