Twilight Sparkle practically threw a glob of celery casserole onto her plate. She would have skipped dinner, but… well, after-dinner research hour wouldn’t be after dinner if dinner never happened, right? She didn’t even bother to use the serving spoon, not when magic would do the trick. “Spike,” she said through her first mouthful, “I got to thinking about that time-travel spell.”

“Not that thing again!” Spike said as he grimaced and held his stomach. “Now that I am future Spike, I don’t want another tummyache like that ever again!”

“No, Spike. We know how it works now, so I wouldn’t make that mistake. No mysterious warnings this time.” She gulped down another bite and took a long drink of water. The sooner she got enough food down to qualify as a meal, the sooner she could get to the important stuff. “I was researching it a bit more. It takes a constant amount of power to produce the effect—it’s how you divide it up that matters. There’s a balance between how far you go back and how long you stay there. Last time, I jumped back far enough that I could only stay a few minutes, but it looks like if I chose a more recent time, I could stay longer.”

Spike nodded, but one eyebrow stayed aloft. “Makes sense. How long do you want it to last?”

“Well, I’ve figured out that the tipping point is about half an hour,” Twilight said. Spike leaned across the sheet of paper she had spread out in front of her and looked over her calculations. After a long glance, he mouthed a few numbers to himself and ran a total on his claws.

Twilight held her breath. She just loved watching him learn.

He shrugged and took a big bite of his topaz.

Letting her breath out, Twilight slumped her shoulders, but the prospect of impending science soon had her in a talkative mood again. “If I go back less than half an hour, the duration drops off again. You can asymptotically approach the time when you left.” Another hasty swallow, another slug of water. Spike would come around. This was science, after all.

“Sounds like trouble,” he said with a smirk that was a little too deliberate. Maybe he wouldn’t come around…

“I agree it could be.” The slow approach might be successful. But not too slow—she wanted to get to the magic! “But we already know that going back further works, as long as you don’t misinterpret things.” Twilight blushed, and Spike groaned while holding his tummy again.

“Think of how useful it could be!” she continued, ticking items off an imaginary list in the air. “Remind yourself of something you forgot to pick up at the market, tell yourself to hurry up or you’ll miss an appointment, jog your memory about a special occasion… There’s lots of good it could do.”

Spike merely scowled.

“C’mon,” Twilight mumbled through another mouthful. “I’m going to try it after dinner. And I’ll only go back ten minutes to test it out at first, to be on the safe side.”

“If you say so.” Spike tapped a claw on the tabletop, and the other covered his mouth, but the smile he was hiding had spread to his eyes. “But don’t get clocky.”

His face red, Spike held back his laughter until he finally erupted in a loud snort. Shards of topaz shot out his nose and skittered across the table.

Twilight stared him down for a moment before rolling her eyes and shoveling in one more forkful of casserole. That should be enough. There was a spell to cast, after all. “Mmph wit owf.” Gulp. “I mean, I can’t wait to try it out!”

“See, Spike? It’s—hic!—working just like before.” Magic flowing, time period firmly in mind… Yes, everything operating within normal parameters. And Spike at his post, holding down the few papers left out on the desk. “Hic!” she added.

“Twilight, you really need to chew your food. You wouldn’t have those hiccups if you hadn’t wolfed it down.” Spike could be adorable when he activated parent mode. Still, she didn’t exactly have time for that right now. But she was about to, and—temporal theory and linguistics sure didn’t mix well.

“Spike, I’m trying to concentrate.” He rolled his eyes and leaned an elbow on the desktop.

The glow from Twilight’s horn expanded to cover her. That same warmth again as in her previous temporal escapade—she knew that she was about to wink out, and Spike had closed his eyes against the expected flash.

“Hic!”

Twilight gobbled down a big bite of casserole, and wasn’t particularly quiet about it, as she needed to get to her experiment. Normally, it would have been an unremarkable occurrence, but this time, Twilight watched her do it.

“It worked!” the new arrival shouted.

Twilight—well, old Twilight—no, technically, she was younger. Original Twilight. Yes. Original Twilight jerked her head up and gaped. “You mean…?”

“Yes!” Twilight clapped her hooves together. “I’m from ten minutes in your future!”

Original Twilight leapt from her chair, squealed, and locked Twilight in a tight hug. “That’s wonderful! Hic! All of our preparations paid off?”

Twilight nodded and directed a huge self-satisfied smile at the ceiling. “Yes. We secured all the loose material in the library, and nothing got blown around. We made sure to secure the ice cream in the freezer—” she gave Spike a pointed glance, and he responded by blowing a raspberry “—and we planned the time interval. I should flash forward again right before you start casting the spell.” A quick look at the clock and… “So I have about five minutes left.”

“Great! Hic! Did it feel any different than… y’know, that debacle last time?”

Twilight winced. “No, just the same.”

“Not like I was gonna eat the ice cream anyway,” Spike muttered.

“Interesting. Hic!” Original Twilight scratched her chin for a moment. “Say, does the spell cure hiccups, too? You don’t seem to have any.”

“Oh. Hm.” True. Strange the things that go unnoticed until they’re mentioned. But yes, she hadn’t hiccupped since she got here—got now… Maybe she’d address the lack of proper terminology at a later date. “No, it wasn’t listed as a side effect. But if it does, that’d be a wonderful advancement for medicine! Ooh, I love progress!” Twilight gushed as they both did a little happy dance. “I’ll be sure to document that when I get back to my own time. This calls for a formal report.”

And then with another peek at the clock, Twilight said, “Okay, it’s getting close. You ought to be able to see me flash forward in two more minutes. Then I can get to work writing this up and publish—hic!”

Twilight gobbled down a big bite of casserole and watched herself do it. “It worked!” the watcher exclaimed.

“Then what about her?” Spike asked, pointing at the third Twilight, who had the worst sense of deja vu right now.

“Wait, how did you get here?” Original Twilight asked.

Oh, no… “I was her a few minutes ago,” Twilight said, angling her muzzle toward her previous iteration. “I came here instead of going back to my time. I don’t know how—I didn’t recast the spell. Did anything unusual happen when you cast it the first time?” she asked Middle Twilight.

“No. You?” Middle Twilight replied.

Twilight shrugged, but her eyes began darting around the room. Things didn’t make sense. She didn’t like it when things didn’t make sense. “I was expecting to be here a couple minutes longer, but the magic activated a little early, right about the time I—”

“Well, the spell was going normally and activated right on time, but at that second, it just happened that I—”

“—hiccupped.”

“—hiccupped.”

“Hic!” Original Twilight contributed. A lengthy silence followed, then she raised her eyebrows and pricked her ears forward.

“Oh, this is too good,” Spike said. “So you—” he pointed at Middle Twilight “—hiccupped when you cast the original spell, and you—” then at Twilight “—hiccupped later and somehow activated the spell again?”

Twilight’s face went ashen. No. No way that could have—“Hic!”

The novelty had long since worn off by now.

Twilight shouldered her way past the other six Twilights standing around to get to the one still eating dinner. “Yes, yes,” she said above the mounting buzz of conversation. “Please just hold your questions for a moment. I think you’ll all appreciate the need to be organized, and I’m the one who’s been through this from the beginning. So. We don’t have long, and I’ll be brief.”

She felt a little poke at her shoulder and looked down to see Spike carrying a tray of drinks. “Iced tea?” he offered.

“Spike, I…” He’d adapted rather quickly, even more so than the first couple of Twilights. “Why aren’t you surprised at all this?”

Shrugging, he said, “Nothing surprises me anymore. Besides…” A gleam formed in his eyes, one Twilight knew all too well.

“If you’re about to make a pun, so help me, I’ll…”

He stuck out his lower lip. “Never mind,” he muttered. “Nose still hurts from the last one, anyway,” he added as he gingerly wiped an arm across his snout.

Twilight shook her head, then took a moment to clear her throat and step up on a chair. “Attention, everypony! We all have the hiccups, and that’s triggering the time spell. Every time one of us hiccups, she goes back to the beginning of the ten minutes and adds another Twilight Sparkle to the mix. We keep track of each other by how many times we’ve been through the loop. I’m number seven, and Miss Stuffs-Her-Face-With-Casserole over there is number zero.” Original Twilight—Zero, that is—pouted and gently set her fork down. “Now, suggestions on how to break the loop?”

“Have Zero never cast the spell?” Four said.

“I’d like to keep that as our failsafe,” Twilight answered. “It could be unpredictable. Then none of this will happen, we won’t remember the danger we’ve uncovered, and we won’t learn anything. I’d like to fix this if we can.” She scanned her audience, and aside from a few nods, nopony spoke up. Wait, if one of them did, shouldn’t she remember asking that question? Well, no, because this was the first time she’d asked it. So these ponies weren’t really Twilight, but would become Twilight. So it was natural that she wouldn’t remember something from the future that had already happened. Or—

She felt a headache coming on.

Five raised a timid hoof. “Tell Zero to wait until after she’s hiccupped to finish the spell?”

“How do we know we haven’t tried that already, and she just hiccupped again?” One asked, scratching her head.

“Ooh!” Six said, a broad grin washing across her face. “Or what if it’s one of those inevitable cosmic events such that the hiccup always comes as she casts the spell, no matter what?”

“Girls.” Twilight squeezed her eyes shut and massaged her temples. “Let’s stay focused. If that were true, two consecutive ones of you would have a different memory of casting the spell.”

“Unless it didn’t work, and we changed it back.” Two instantly retreated from the glare she got in return.

“Still, the one who last tried it should remember,” one of them said. Twilight had lost track of which.

“No, because it all feeds forward from Zero there. Would you remember something that never existed?” Two replied.

“I think the lesson we all need to learn from this is that Spike was right,” said a voice in a badly disguised falsetto.

Twilight stamped a hoof, which, in retrospect, wasn’t the brightest thing to do while perched on a chair. “Please! This is taking too long! I think we need to try curing Zero’s hiccups.”

“What should we try first?” Six asked while casting a wary eye at Five, who was sneaking up behind Zero with a rubber snake.

“She already has a glass of water,” Three remarked. “Might as well try that.”

Twilight flicked a hoof at the table and nodded hastily. “Okay, but make it quick. You never know when—hic!”

Twilight shouldered her way past the other seven Twilights standing around to get to the one still eating dinner. “Okay. We wasted the last go-around jabbering. You—” she poked a hoof toward Zero “—refill that glass and guzzle it down without stopping to breathe. The rest of us need to come up with other ideas in case that doesn’t cure her hiccups.”

An eyebrow shooting up, One said, “Wait, what do hiccups have to do with this?”

Twilight sighed and rubbed her eyes. “I don’t have time to explain it again right now.”

“One of us should write this stuff down,” Six said, then froze under all the silent gazes directed at her. She continued, apparently using her best Fluttershy impression. “You know… so there’s… a standard pitch.”

Twilight stared and blinked at Six for a moment. That… was actually a wonderful idea. Why hadn’t Twilight thought of it? Well, she had, but not this her… She didn’t remember writing anything down previously. “Yes,” Twilight finally said. “Excellent suggestion. I’ll start on that immediately.” And now she did remember it.

Here came that headache again.

She waved off Spike, who had appeared at her side with a platter of daisy canapes, and grabbed a sheet of paper and a quill off the writing desk, then scribbled furiously to get as much down as possible before—“Hic!”

Nine expectant faces stared at Twilight—well, a couple of the early ones were shifting their eyes around and seemingly wondering what they were missing. “Not now,” she said, holding up a hoof to silence their murmurs. “I have to get through this as fast as I can. And one of you who knows what I’m talking about, please make Zero hold her breath.”

Twilight bent back down to her paper. She had to keep it short enough to read in a couple of minutes but cover the material pretty thoroughly. And would she have to edit each time to add what new thing she’d tried? Maybe not every time. With any luck, this list wouldn’t get too long…

“Hic!”

“Not done yet!” Twilight shouted over everypony’s questions. “Just give me some peace and quiet and get Zero to stand on her head.”

The two others writing next to her leaned over to peek at her paper. “Eyes on your own work!” she admonished them. “Keep at it, or you might undo my copy!”

After a chorus of huhs, a few hushed explanations, and some much-welcome silence, Twilight stabbed the final period into her page. That should about do it.

She cleared her throat, and everypony took that as their cue to strike up conversations again, but her stony, no-nonsense gaze soon had the hubbub dying down. “Now, for everypony’s information, getting Zero to delay her casting didn’t work, and neither did drinking water or holding her breath. Those of you that have no idea what I’m talking about, you will in a few minutes. Then we can get back to figuring this out, assuming that the stand-on-your-head thing doesn’t actually fix everything.”

“Hic!” Zero added. Somewhat unhelpfully, though perhaps the demonstration was illustrative.

“Wait, eventually your hiccups will stop,” came a voice from the assemblage. “Then everypony will go through the loop as many times as you did, jump back to her own time, and voila!”

“I’ve already thought this through,” Twilight replied. “Yes, that would work. But then the time spell would still be linked to hiccups, and the next time I got them…”

“Oh. Yeah…” Four said, her ears angling back, but her face soon brightened again. “But that’s only part of the problem. Once your hiccups end, there will be no more loops, and we’ve run out of chances.”

Twilight’s jaw dropped. That was… right. And so obvious that somehow she hadn’t seen it. Everypony stared at her like they expected some assurance, some reasoned argument, some nugget of philosophical insight.

“Damn it.”

“Language, Twilight!” Spike hissed from the back of the crowd.

“I-I need to keep them going…” Twilight rushed over to the table and crammed a hoofful of casserole into her mouth, then another. She couldn’t keep that up for long, or she’d get sick. Could she fake the hiccups? Would that activate the spell? Oh crud oh crud oh crud oh cr—“Hic!”

Twilight coaxed her voice into as much of a shout as she could. She’d gone hoarse some while ago, and her throat—even thinking about swallowing gave her a sinking feeling. “Okay,” she rasped. “Twenty-Three is passing out orientation pamphlets. Get one if you are Sixteen or lower. If you don’t know your number, you are One or Zero and need to get one, too.”

She coughed into her hoof and blinked hard. “Give your pamphlets to Twenty-Two when you’re finished reading. Scare Team is meeting over by the fireplace, New Ideas Team with me, Refreshments Team in the kitchen with Spike, and Temporal Theory Team by the reference books.”

Next order of business. Twilight strode to the dinner table and choked down some more casserole. She had to keep hiccupping. But to be honest, she was running out of time. She was this close to puking, and hiccupping while feeling like that was about as pleasant as it sounded.

The squeak of a hinge carried above all the voices, and thirty-eight Twilights turned to see Rainbow Dash standing in the doorway.

“Hi, um… I… wondered what all the commotion—” Dash’s wide eyes scanned all of the silent faces. “I’ll come back later.” And then she retreated slowly out the door, which swung shut with another loud creak.

Keeping this unnoticed may get to be a problem. Maybe they should form a Public Relations Team, too. Twilight pursed her lips as Spike’s raucous laughter floated over from the kitchen doorway. “The look on her face!” he wheezed.

But back on topic… Altogether, Twilight had been hiccupping for nearly two hours. She was lucky it had lasted this long. She had to face it: The time had come to trigger the failsafe. Would Twilight be around to warn herself then? And all that knowledge lost! It still required an uncomfortable amount of risk.

She let out a heavy sigh. “New Ideas Team, it’s time to implement The Final Option. We’ll tell Zero not to cast the spell in the first place.” An “aww” and several pairs of drooping ears surrounded her, but… a grim, thoughtful smile spread over her muzzle. “After one last try.”

“Hic!”

Without a word, Twilight weaved her way through the multitude of herself—herselves? Maybe there should be a word for that now. She recognized Eighteen with that fresh bruise she always got on her cheek from tripping when she first showed up. And another Twilight nearby hung her head low enough to place her in the thirties. The three already helping themselves to some casserole would be Eleven, Twelve, and of course Zero. She didn’t want to think about food at all—she was so full…

But no more. No more eating, no more pounding her head for obscure ways of treating hiccups. No more overseeing everything. One way or another, she’d reached the end.

“Take a breather, everypony,” she said. “I already know what I’m trying this time, and if it doesn’t work, we’re shutting it down. So thank you all for your hard work, you don’t need to keep eating, and just relax. You’ve earned it.”

Twilight took the seat at the table next to Zero and patted her hoof. “Try to remember everything. I don’t know if it will help, but really think about all this and try to keep it in there,” she said, tapping Zero on the head. “Just a minute…”

Twilight headed to the kitchen, reached over Spike to grab a bottle out of the refrigerator, and returned to her chair, then downed Zero’s glass of water and refilled it from the bottle. “I think you know what I’m going for here—” Zero nodded gravely “—but we haven’t stopped your hiccups in thirty-some tries, and we can’t have the spell linked to something you have that little control over.”

Zero raised the glass to her lips, but Twilight held up a hoof. “Not yet. Wait until a minute before you cast the time-travel spell. Then drink it all. And keep this with you at all times,” she added, sliding a pamphlet across the tabletop.

Jogging out to Twilight’s side, Spike said, “Aww. This had started getting fun.” He hugged her foreleg.

Twilight sighed and slumped forward on the table. This might not be a better solution than avoiding the spell in the first place. But for better or worse, she’d put things into motion, and only time would tell—had told—

Her head hurt.

“Hic!”

“See, Spike? It’s—hic!—working just like before.” Magic flowing, time period firmly in mind… Yes, everything operating within normal parameters. And Spike at his post, holding down the few papers left out on the desk. “Hic!” she added.

“Twilight, you really need to chew your food. You wouldn’t have those hiccups if you hadn’t wolfed it down.” Spike could be adorable when he activated parent mode. Still, she didn’t exactly have time for that right now. But she was about to, and—temporal theory and linguistics didn’t mix well.

“Spike, I’m trying to concentrate.” He rolled his eyes and leaned an elbow on the desktop.

The glow from Twilight’s horn expanded to cover her. That same warmth again as in her previous temporal escapade—she knew that she was about to wink out, and Spike had closed his eyes against the expected flash.

“BUUUUUUURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRP!”

Twilight gobbled down a big bite of casserole, and wasn’t particularly quiet about it, as she needed to get to her experiment. Normally, it would have been an unremarkable occurrence, but this time, Twilight watched her do it.

“It worked!” the new arrival shouted, then immediately covered her mouth with her hooves and opened her eyes wide.

Original Twilight jerked her head up and gaped. “You mean…?”

“Yes…” Twilight murmured. “I-I…” She couldn’t force herself to say any more. Only a squeaky wheeze escaped her lips. She stumbled, stiff-legged, to the kitchen and came back with the bottle of soda water. “Later,” she grunted. “When I disappear. All of it.”

She flopped into an empty chair and buried her head in her hooves. Hidden though they were, Original Twilight could probably see her cheeks glowing red—they burned like hot coals.

“Aren’t you going to tell me about it?”

Twilight merely shook her head. Once through the cycle, and she’d know it all, anyway. “Sorry” was all she could muster as she waited for the spell to expire.

How much time had gone by? She only wanted to get back—

Spike. She’d never hear the end of it…

“UUUUUURRRRRRRRP!” still echoed throughout the room when Twilight returned.

His little reptilian eyes sparkling, Spike stared at her for a long moment before he found his voice. “That. Was. Awesome!”

She shot him an icy glare and clenched her jaw. “Don’t you ever tell anypony about this.”

He clamped his claws over his mouth, and a snort erupted from between his fingers, but no pieces of gem this time.

“I’m serious.” Strange… Twilight had a sudden mental image of a whole crowd of her milling about in the library. But what did it mean? She hadn’t been asleep…

Her attention finally fell to the folded sheet of paper clutched in her hoof. Across the top, her own characteristic writing beckoned to her. “So You’re Caught in a Time Anomaly: Your Questions Answered.”

What…?

She unfolded it and flicked her eyes down the careful printing. Hiccups… linked to the time spell… and a scrawled note at the end about soda water. Yes, she’d never belch like that again—there was no danger of reactivating the spell.

Too much. All at once. Twilight’s head was going to overflow.

And then Rarity poked her head in the door. “Are you alright, dear? It sounded like somepony was starting a chainsaw down here. I feared for the safety of your tree!”

Twilight groaned, and if Spike bit his lip any harder, he’d be liable to draw blood.

“Oh, did you hear it, too?” called Pinkie from the street. “I was cleaning up at Sugarcube Corner, and suddenly there was all this burpy racket. Who did it? I gotta shake that pony’s hoof!”

“Oh, damn it,” Twilight said under her breath.

“Language, Twilight!” a snickering Spike said.

“An—” Rarity squinted and screwed up her face at the word’s flavor as she drew it out “—eructation? Heavens! That must have been some letter, Spike!”

Spike grinned as big as Twilight had ever seen. “No, Rarity, it was—”

Twilight curled a foreleg around him and hustled him over toward the kitchen door. “Spike,” she whispered, “you have to take the fall for this. Seriously. I will give you whatever you want.”

Somehow, his smile grew even bigger. He rubbed his claws together. “Oh… um, that was just Princess Celestia sending me the latest Deers and Roebuck catalog.”

“Hm.” Rarity rubbed a hoof at her chin, then shook her head. “Well, perhaps the Princess should send those during the day from now on. It’s set all the dogs in the neighborhood to barking, dear.”

“Yeah, they were all ‘Ruff, ruff!’ and I was all ‘Arf, arf!’ but I don’t think they understood,” Pinkie said, wedging herself into the doorway beside Rarity.

“Well, as long as you’re here, you wanna join my ice cream party?” Spike asked.

Twilight raised an eyebrow. “What about getting another tummyache?”

“If that happens, we can go back and fix it with a bottle of cola,” he answered.

Rarity creased her brow. “Well… I suppose carbonation can help settle one’s stomach, but would you really want something else that sweet?”

“No,” Spike said, shaking his head, “it’s for—” Twilight shot him a glare. “Never mind. Who wants sprinkles?”