Rejection

Disclaimer: I do not own My Little Pony, nor am I profiting off this literary venture.

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The mornings were the worst part of her day.

She'd wake with the sun, go downstairs, and have a delightful breakfast of toast and coffee.

The same as every other Tuesday morning.

Then she'd examine the newspaper, see that absolutely nothing had changed, and carry on with her routine.

It was, in its own way, critical.

If she wasn't seen reading up on the commons of the day to day, ponies would think she didn't care about their lives. They'd end up doing insane things to get her attention.

Like knocking on her door, or sending her baked goods or fruit, or having Rainbow Dash propel herself through her study window at speeds just shy of mach-1.

Actually, Twilight Sparkle still hadn't followed the particular event trail that caused that last one to happen.

It certainly hadn't repeated itself, regardless of vigorous testing.

Which was, in hindsight, far more curious than not.

Regardless though, after nipping Pumpkin Spice's future gossip in the bud, she typically took care of her leftover paperwork from Monday until roughly lunch time.

That was when the fun happened.

Fun for her.

Tedious and boring for most.

She had a unique opportunity, after all.

She had the single most complex enchantment currently known to ponykind sitting in her library, after all.

And she was tearing it apart. Strand by strand.

Except the one time she did it literally.

She'd... Been having a bad day.

For a very long time.

Starswirl's Mirror was an amazing piece of work, it contained a gap in reality, through which a tunnel had been bored to another reality. And then both ends had been, for lack of a better term, applied to otherwise mundane materials.

It wasn't like she could just stick her hoof through any other mirror, now could she?

She couldn't. She'd tried. It had been a bad day.

Boredom... May have been a bit of an issue.

Though that wasn't to say she hadn't been successful at the brunt of her endeavors on disassembling the mirror, just that, from time to time she needed a break.

And that usually involved crazy pony shenanigans.

Like the one time she'd visited Applejack, learned square dancing from Granny Smith and then had to help the old mare win a hoof at poker to pay for a new hip

Briefly, Twilight Sparkle, Princess of Friendship and youngest alicorn of Equestria debated writing everything down.

Maybe making a book of it?

Before discarding the idea. It hadn't worked last time.

And she'd run out of variety to try around Ponyville. At least without finding Discord.

So instead, after Lunch, every Tuesday, she buckled down to keep working on the mirror. And she was making progress.

Though, she decided, Starswirl was maybe a bit touched in the horn.

The basic enchantment on the mirror was relatively simple. It was a more complex, safer and far more powerful version of what was placed on magicians boxes, the vanishing cabinets that swapped a ponies position via pre-programmed teleportation across two clearly defined anchors.

The conditional limiter on that enchantment was, again, relatively simple. It would lock the other side based on the phase of the moon.

She'd learned how to do that all the way back in magical seventh grade.

The rest of the enchantments, though, was where things started getting tricky.

Because while some unicorns would remember that Starswirl was the founder of Time Magic, he was also a tinker. He had more incomplete spells in his wing of the library than finished ones, some that were simply never completed and others he failed to write down.

And the time spells attached to the mirror?

He definitely never wrote them down.

It took a lot of work, especially since she was functionally doing everything from memory, but she managed to break down a few of them.

Like the one that, if activated while the mirror was drawing out a source of dark magic, would eject it into a random point on the other side of the gap.

It was entirely possible that the sirens had only been in the human world for a few days before they'd started the battle of the bands.

On the opposite end of the extreme, they may well have been the founders for the city of Canterlot.

Without interviewing them, it would be impossible to say when, exactly, they had been thrown out.

Twilight couldn't decide if that was clever or hare-brained.

The other time spell he'd woven into the mirror though?

Well, Starswirl should probably be happy he'd passed away almost a millenia ago. If not, Twilight would have words for him.

Like 'Jerk'.

She had no idea if it was commonplace to curse your enchanted items way, way back in the day. Starswirl and Sombra simply weren't enough points of data to make a definitive conclusion.

But she'd take her greatest fear over being stuck in a blasted twenty-four hour long time loop for trying to unweave an innocuous looking spell to update the mirrors integral stability to the spell that determined if it needed to auto-repair!

She didn't even know what the end-goal of the spell was supposed to be!

Did it remove her from normal time? Had her friends woken up one Wednesday morning to find she just wasn't there?

Were there other ponies, some poor unicorns trapped in a day that would never end?

Twilight was terrified the answer was 'Yes.'.

But she hadn't let it stop her. Day after day, Tuesday after Tuesday, she got up in the mornings.

And she had toast.

And she got to work.

Because she wouldn't get herself unstuck by doing nothing!

Twilight's chin struck the table as she glared at the book in front of her.

She hated days like this. Days where she was feeling introspective.

It always left her feeling powerless. Depressed.

But that didn't stop her from feeling a charge in the air. A smell akin to burning metal was slowly filling the room.

"Woah, this place is neat! It's full of those books Twilight likes!" That voice.

She hadn't heard that voice in...

She wasn't sure. It... Had been a long, long time.

Her head whipped around and she froze.

He was standing there. Standing on two claws, his tail wagging back and forth behind him.

His emerald eyes were taking in everything around him, walking in a circle and oohing and aahing at everything.

Finally he seemed to notice her petrified form and he bounded to her, bouncing on his claws and tripping to get to her.

The pony in her said she needed to back away. The researcher said this was something new.

The Twilight Sparkle in her said nothing as she stared, transfixed, as a baby dragon ran up to her.

"Hi! I'm Spike!"

Author's Notes:

I can spell innocuous without having to look it up, and end up missing the N in anchor.
Lovely.