Experimental Variables
Chapter 1: Experimental Variables
"Experimental Variables"
by Donny's Boy
Synopsis: Dimly it occurs to her, somewhere through the haze of magic and the relentless onslaught of images, that the spell has both gone very right and gone very, very wrong. A TwiPie story.
She is an out of control forest fire of a pony, crackling, blazing, every inch as dangerous as any hydra or dragon could ever hope to be. She consumes your thoughts just as voraciously as she consumes cakes and pies and cookies. She doesn't know how she dominates your mind, but somehow, that fact just seems to make her ever the more deadly in your eyes.
You are used to calm intellect, to quiet deliberation. To reflection, to rationalization, to all things cerebral. Every thing in its proper place, and a proper place for every thing. But there is no proper place for her. There is nothing - and there is no one - that can possibly contain her for any measurable amount of time.
She scares you. You'll never admit it, especially not to her, but she scares you. Just a little.
"Whatcha doin' today?"
She flinches, ever so slightly. She doesn't even bother to ask from whence the other pony came, because there is never any sort of comprehensible answer. "Oh, nothing really. Just, uh, working on a new spell."
"Ooh! Can I watch? Can I, can I?"
A pause.
"Pretty please? With whipped cream and chocolate and cherries and sprinkles on top?"
A decision - sudden, impulsive. So very unlike her. "Sure. Sure! Why not?"
She scares you. You'll never admit it, especially not to her, but she scares you. Just a little.
She is perfection personified - brilliant, brave, dauntless. She is Magic, and indeed she is magic. Before she blew into town like a tornado and turned your life upside down, you were so very lonely, always solitary and apart even when surrounded by a crowd. Your friends, whom you now cherish, whom you need like you need water and air, were mere acquaintances back then. It was she who brought the five of you together. She took the five of you in her hooves as a blacksmith takes up iron, and through the fire of adversity she forged you into the closest of friends.
While others may claim that they would follow a pony to the ends of the earth, you have actually done so, and it was she who you followed. It is she who you follow still. And it is she who you will follow always, because she is the one who gave you everything you hold so very dear.
You love her desperately. You can't help but love her. Sometimes it worries you, just how much you love this strange, overwhelming pony.
"See, what I'm trying to do is to recalibrate my magical energies so that I can affect fourth-dimensional objects."
"Ooooh."
An amused chuckle. "You have no idea what I just said, do you?"
"Not a clue!"
"Okay. Okay." A long, thoughtful pause. "Here, let me try again." She will always try again. "There's space, right? I mean, we can move up and down, left and right, back and forth. And there's time. If there's no time, everything's frozen, and nothing can move, right? "
A slow, tentative nod.
"Right. But time and space aren't really separate. They're both just different elements of the same … uh … the same basic stuff that makes up what we call the universe." A tilt of the head; a wry grin. "So what I'm attempting here is to cast magic that will affect things temporally-that is, in terms of time-as well as their position in space."
A broad smile, as bright and as beautiful as Celestia's sun. "Wow!"
You love her desperately. You can't help but love her. Sometimes it worries you, just how much you love this strange, overwhelming pony.
It makes no logical sense. You know that full well. The two of you couldn't be less alike and couldn't have less in common, and there is no pony in the whole of Equestria who can get on your every last nerve quite as much as she can. Truth be told, you can only handle her special brand of insanity in fairly limited, fairly infrequent doses.
But you can't pretend that your entire chest doesn't nearly burst with happiness and warmth every single time she smiles at you. You can't ignore the way those sparkling, penetrating eyes of hers reach deep down inside you, touching places you didn't even know existed, or the way her enthusiastic hugs make you feel as though there is nopony more important in her world than you. You can't deny that you want so much to actually be the most important pony in her world.
It's insanity, of course. All of it. Pure, unbridled insanity.
Maybe you're more alike than you'd thought.
Blistering hot breath on the back of her neck.
"A little space, please?" Her tone is harsh, because if it isn't harsh, she knows - just knows - that her voice will lapse into a pathetic, pleading whimper. "This is a delicate spell, and I need to concentrate."
"Sorry!" The other pony takes a step back.
Immediately her neck feels cold, and it's as though all the warmth has been sucked right out of the room. She fights off a shiver. Tries to refocus. Focus - yes, that's what she needs, focus. She closes her eyes and turns her attentions inwards, towards that well of magical energy that lives within her, and allows the energy to begin flooding into her horn.
Finally she opens her eyes, and she spots a lit candle on her lectern. That will do nicely. She stares into the flame of the candle, concentrating as hard as she can, thinking about all points of time in this candle's existence, and then -
A cough, very quiet. Pinkie Pie. She scrabbles, tries to take back the thought, to refocus, to halt the spell. But it's too late.
- her magic bursts forth in an explosion of blinding violet light.
Maybe you're more alike than you'd thought.
She is buzzing with energy and enthusiasm right now, her entire face lit up like fireworks as her horn begins to softly glow. It's lovely to behold; she's lovely to behold. The things that ignite this spark in her are different from those that ignite your own - foreign things, inexplicable things, arcane knowledge and mysterious magic and the thrill of self-mastery - but the spark itself is something very, very familiar to you.
You wonder if you could explain to her. If you could make her understand. About the desperate needs that live and breathe inside your own chest - for companionship, for affection, for others to be happy so that their joy can fill up the emptiness that always threatens. If she can try to explain her magic to you, perhaps you can explain what magic means to you. It's a different kind of magic, true, but magic it is nonetheless.
You look at her, a pony so beautiful and so unknowable, and you dare to wonder. You dare to hope.
The flash of violet light lasts only a moment, but it reveals a lifetime.
She sees everything, all at once, memories that haven't yet happened, all jumbled together into a single, incoherent mess. Faces, places, events. A picnic, a party, a wedding, a birth. But only those places and events involving a certain pink baker - dimly it occurs to her, somewhere through the haze of magic and the relentless onslaught of images, that the spell has both gone very right and gone very, very wrong.
Intimate moments, too. A soft laugh, a quick nuzzle. Whispers in the dark. A kiss, sweet and chaste … then kisses that are not at all chaste, kisses that are deep and passionate, kisses that make her feel as though she's slowly drowning. There is yelling, and there is crying, and there is laughing. There is fighting and making up and hanging on and letting go - and, above all, there is love.
There is an entire universe of love.
A soft voice, filled with wonder, breaks through the haze to reach her ears: "Is this … is this the future?"
Dizzily, she shakes her head. When she finally regains her bearings, she finds herself safely back in her library, back in the present day. Her friend is looking at her with wide, shining blue eyes.
You look at her, a pony so beautiful and so unknowable, and you dare to wonder. You dare to hope.
You wonder what truths lurk behind those beaming smiles and what secrets lie hidden within that laughing heart. Sometimes she seems to know things that she shouldn't know, that she has no reason and no way to know. She is capable of doing things that no pony can possibly do, things you can't even begin to comprehend, and she does them as casually as any other pony might take a sip of water from a glass.
She is the biggest mystery you have ever met. And, intentionally or unintentionally, she's resisted your every last attempt to solve her. That fact is maddening. Exasperating. And it is strangely, perversely attractive.
If you said you weren't uncontrollably turned on right now, you'd be lying through your teeth.
"You … you mean you saw that, too?" she asks in a voice that is little more than a whisper. Her mouth is bone dry.
A small nod. An unusually tentative smile.
She swallows. Then swallows again. "Yes. Yes, it was the future. Well, one possible future, anyways." She glances away, no longer able to stand those big, blue eyes that seem to be gazing right into the depths of her soul. "Now that we've seen it, we have knowledge that they … uh, we … those other, future versions of us didn't have. So things will be different, just as a matter of course."
"Like the butterflies!"
"Like the … what?"
"The butterflies!" A giggle, followed by an amused eye roll. "They flap their wings, and it changes the wind and stuff, even though butterflies are teeny tiny, and then hurricanes happen! Right?"
She just stares, in bewildered awe, for a few long moments. "Chaos theory," she finally murmurs, half to herself. "You're talking about chaos theory ..."
If you said you weren't uncontrollably turned on right now, you'd be lying through your teeth.
She has that intense look on her face that she gets sometimes, the one you know and love so well. It's the look that immediately preceded the demises of both Nightmare Moon and Discord, the look that means serious business. It's the look that makes her sparkling, violet eyes burn with all the heat and fury of dragon-fire. It's terrifying, and it's thrilling. You can't stand the intensity of those eyes, and yet neither can you bear to look away.
Then, she smiles at you, and your breath catches in your throat. She doesn't smile at you often. Consequently, each and every smile from her is a gift that is precious and rare. Slowly it dawns on you that she's smiling because you've caught her off-guard, which is not an uncommon occurrence - and also that she's smiling because she's impressed with you, which is uncommon.
A sudden, fierce, wildly ecstatic sense of pride swells within your chest.
You have never wanted to kiss her quite so badly as you do right here and right now.
"Maybe it's fate?"
A dismissive snort. "I don't believe in fate."
"You didn't use to believe in my twitcha-twitch powers, either."
She flinches at that. Feels a sharp stab of regret.
"Well, maybe it's not fate, but …" A cautious step forward. "But maybe we could make it our fate?"
After a moment's hesitation, she takes a step forward, too. Their eyes are locked. The very air between them hums and ripples with unspoken tension. It's oppressive, irresistible.
"Are you sure about this?" she breathes, her lips just a hair's breadth away from her friend's.
"Nope," comes the whispered reply. But there's an unmistakable twinkle in those blue eyes. "Are you?"
"Not even a little bit." Softly she chuckles. "But I'm glad I'm not the only one who's unsure."
The other pony smiles, one of those dazzling smiles that make her feel as though they are the only two ponies in the entire world - that make her feel as though she might actually be as special as everypony says she is - and that's all it takes. She decides to give in to the insanity.
You have never wanted to kiss her quite so badly as you do right here and right now. And so you do.
It is everything like those memories of things that have not yet happened, of things that may never happen, and it is nothing like those memories. The sensation of drowning, though, the drowning is exactly the same. You drown in her completely. You drown in the scent of cookies that lingers in her mane, in the taste of hot sauce that burns on her lip. You flounder in the feeling of her warm, soft chest pressing relentlessly against yours.
It's overwhelming. She's overwhelming. You can't breathe, you can't think - you can barely brace yourself enough to keep from stumbling and falling over. She consumes you just as voraciously as she consumes cakes and pies and cookies. From somewhere deep inside you she draws out a long, low moan of unrestrained pleasure.
It's utterly overwhelming … and it is exhilarating.
She is an out of control forest fire of a pony, crackling, blazing, every inch as dangerous as any hydra or dragon could ever hope to be. And you would have her be nothing else and nothing less.
Author's Notes: In my blog over at Fimfiction, I asked folks if they had any story requests. TallTale requested a TwiPie story, so here 'tis.