Spike poked his head into Starlight's room. A quick look around told him most of what he needed to know. Not much had changed from yesterday or from the day before, when he'd guided her to one of the castle's many guest rooms. The walls were bare of any personal touches, Starlight herself was a lump under the bed's covers, and the salad he'd left outside the door last night had barely been touched. She had eaten a little bit—by some process Spike didn't fully understand, making the salad made it his on some magical level, and he could catalog its contents at a glance—but only a few bites.

His nose told him the rest. The sparse information he'd found about dragons never mentioned their sense of smell. Spike suspected that changing the usual "My teeth are like swords, my claws spears" boasts to include "My nose is like a chemical analysis lab" would disrupt the mood. Still, the comparison was apt, even if what he thought of the different smells didn't quite match what ponies thought of them. The locker-room mustiness of unwashed unicorn pervaded the room, along with the pleasant perfume of the castle's crystal. But lurking beneath both was the sinus-tingling scent of æther, effervescent as a freshly opened bottle of soda held up to a nostril.

Spike sighed. "You don't have to teleport to the bathroom, you know."

The lump didn't shift beyond the steady rhythm of its breathing.

Spike shook his head, took the remains of Starlight's dinner, and left. Twilight waited for him a bit down the corridor, her wings fidgeting.

"How's she doing?" Twilight stretched her neck over Spike even as she asked, as though trying to catch a glimpse of Starlight.

Spike sighed. "Same as yesterday. She won't speak, she barely eats, and wherever she's going to do her business, she isn't bathing when she's there. The room's starting to smell like the old tower during finals prep week."

Twilight winced as she remembered how she'd made more time in her schedule to study back then. "And every time I come in, she curls up and waits for regal judgement. I'd hoped that giving Starlight time to herself might help her come to grips with what she'd done, but she's just wallowing in it."

"So, what are we going to do about it?"

Twilight opened her mouth, but a flashing light on the tip of her horn cut her off. She snuffed it and said, "That spell's tied to Sunset's journal. I'm going to see what she wrote. You can start trying to get Starlight out of this rut." She smiled. "You have a lot of experience dealing with unicorns too powerful for their own good."

Spike kept most of what he thought about that to himself, though he did permit himself a grin and a "Don't I know it."

Starlight tried to tune out existence as best as she could, especially the scaly bit of existence that kept trying to feed her obvious lies about how she'd been forgiven for bringing untold suffering to seven times the world's population. She knew Twilight Sparkle was hopelessly sentimental, but nopony could get away with that kind of atrocity. Nopony should.

Hoofsteps announced Twilight's approach outside of Starlight's self-imposed prison cell. Just because the new princess didn't have the guts to use her dungeon, that didn't mean that Starlight could let herself get away without some kind of punishment. Certainly not with a reward, assuming Twilight's offer of tutelage and patronage could be believed. Which, obviously, it couldn't. The world just didn't work that way.

The dragon scampered closer to his mistress. Starlight paid a bit more attention, if only to know how thinly she had stretched the princess's patience.

"Well?"

"No good. She's completely unresponsive. If she didn't keep turning away from me, I'd have thought she was comatose."

"You gave it your best shot, Spike. Let me take over." Hoofsteps approached Starlight. She squeezed her eyelids tighter.

"Starlight?"

Starlight said nothing. What was there to say?

"Starlight, I'd like you to come with me."

Starlight didn't move. Why bother? She'd get what was coming to her eventually.

Fuchsia magic enveloped her and lifted her off the bed. She flinched a bit out of reflex, but hung limply once she got a grip on herself. The time had come. Time to face the music. Starlight opened her eyes and saw an eerily familiar forced smile on Twilight's lips.

"Okay!" Twilight said with forced cheeriness to match her Our Town grin. "We're just going to take a little trip." She trotted through the castle, carefully steering Starlight clear of door frames. "Just to be clear, this isn't a banishment. The portal will be open the whole time. All I ask is that you stay in that dimension for the whole conversation."

Starlight blinked a few times as the words penetrated her malaise. "Wait, what?"

"You'll see. And hopefully, once you're through here, we can focus on your friendship studies! I've been putting together a small curriculum we can discuss upon your return." Starlight looked down at Twilight's face. The smile was little more than bared teeth, and the eyes spoke of something that could never be mistaken for sanity. "Doesn't that sound like fun?"

Starlight realized that Twilight's imagination was far better than hers. To think, she’d thought being a princess’s pupil would be a reward. "... Yes?"

"Wonderful!" Twilight pulled a lever.

Starlight only then became aware of her surroundings, watching as the various devices around an ornate mirror churned to life. "Hold on, what is all of this?"

"You'll see. And don't worry, almost no one in that world knows what you've done. Have fun!"

"Doing wha—" Twilight tossed Starlight into the mirror midsentence.

After a great deal of uncomfortable twisting and stretching, Starlight found herself on the ground in an almost wholly unfamiliar body, dressed in some rough, itchy garment that looked like it had begun life as a potato sack. "What?" She stared at the gangly things that had replaced her forehooves. "What?" She tried to get to all fours and found her body didn't much appreciate that. Something took her fetlocks in its own paws and helped her rear up, which her body seemed to accept. She stared into turquoise eyes and said, "What?"

The face containing those eyes smiled. "Trust me, I know how you feel. I'm Sunset Shimmer, local Spirit of Harmony. You're Starlight Glimmer, right?"

Starlight didn't trust herself not to speak in What. She just nodded.

"Welcome to Earth, and to a human body. Be happy that you arrived after the upgrades." Sunset tapped the jewel set into her forehead. "This universe used to have next to no magic."

"Why am I here?"

"So we can discuss the outcome of your crimes against space-time." Starlight turned to the new voice and saw a frowning "human" in a suit that almost perfectly matched its mint-green skin.

Sunset frowned at... her? It certainly sounded feminine. "Come on, Lyra. She clearly regrets what she's done. Just look at her outfit!"

Lyra rolled her eyes. "Yes, yes, I'll see if I can find any ashes or a whip to go with it. That doesn't change the fact that she's caused the biggest headache for the Bureau since Twilight read Starswirl's Unfinished Spell. At least most of those permutations merged back together into a single whole."

Sunset crossed her forelegs. "I asked you here in the hopes that you'd put aside the grudge for five minutes."

"Grudge? Grudge? Do you have any idea how many subjective hours of work that maniac has put me through?"

Starlight winced. "Lyra," Sunset said sharply.

Lyra took a deep breath. "I have literally not slept for a week. I am running on fumes and stimulant spells. You'll have to pardon me if I'm feeling less than compassionate."

"Ignore them." A paw—no, hand, that was the term for minotaurs—on Starlight's withers brought her attention to the same "human" creature who she'd seen in the throne room a few days earlier, the one also named Twilight. "They've basically been having the same argument since they arrived here."

"Uh..." Starlight fumbled for something to say. "Thanks?"

"How are you handling all of this? I'd imagine that this is very disorienting for you."

Starlight took a moment to think about that. "Well... huh. The disorientation is actually helping. It's distracting me from..." She looked away. "Well, you were there."

"Right. The time-space magic. Speaking of." Twilight slapped her hands together, drawing the others' attention. "Okay! You two can argue in circles some other time. Right now, I'd like to know what the state of those other worldlines is, and I think Starlight would as well."

The commanding tone finally made the last connection click in Starlight's mind. "Twilight? Twilight Sparkle?"

The human Twilight gave her a confused look. "Uh, yes. I thought you knew."

"I do now."

"A Twilight, just not the Twilight you know. Yadda yadda, alternate universes, different dominant species and magic levels with the same soul harmonics, you get the drill. Now, onto business." The golden jewel in Lyra's forehead lit up and projected an image of several spheres. Two large ones floated opposite one another, one topped with a tree, the other with a human torso. Near the tree-topped sphere, on the side furthest from the other, was a cluster of seven smaller spheres. "Here. Equestria. The splinter worldlines." Lyra's finger moved from left to right along the diagram, jabbing at points of interest as she named them. "Any questions?"

"Can those other worlds access this one?" said Sunset.

"Not through the mirror portal. Princess Twilight was instrumental in taking you down back during the Fall Formal, to say nothing of her recovering the Element of Magic in the first place. Without her playing that key role, there's no telling what you might have gotten up to, but you certainly wouldn't have ascended to spirithood."

Starlight stared at the illusion, at her unwitting, suffering creations. "Is there any way to fix this?"

Lyra gave her a long, hard look. "Twilight tried. Several times. Those worldlines are like icebergs calved off of a glacier. You can't just glue them back on." Her features softened by a minute degree. "Well, it's not the best metaphor. Technically speaking, they all already existed. The probability of their existence had just been so low that they were nearly indistinguishable from the background of probability space. You basically just dug them out of the higher-dimensional muck, and we can't bury them again."

"Oh." Starlight tried to tap her forehooves together, idly noting the novel sensation that produced. "Is there anything I can do to help with your workload?"

A laugh burst out of Lyra before she could quash it. She gave a crooked grin. "You're making it really hard to stay mad at you, you know that?"

Starlight turned to Twilight and Sunset. "Do I apologize here? I'm not sure if I'm supposed to or not."

Twilight shrugged. "I just pretend I have social skills most of the time. It generally works out well."

"Sure, when you're not crusading to defend my honor," said Sunset, nudging her with a knee. (Were they still called knees on arms?)

Twilight flushed. "I only did it the one time."

"No, I appreciated it. Really. Though you're awfully devout for someone who doesn't believe I'm a god."

"That isn't devotion, it's friendship."

"Textbook 'best friendship' if I'm any judge," Lyra said with a smirk. She turned to Starlight. "To answer your question, we've already done the lion's share of the work. Each bundle of worldlines you and your analogues created formed along very similar lines; most of them should fold into one another soon." Lyra's expression returned to its earlier scorn. "Besides, you do seem to sincerely regret your actions, but that doesn't mean I trust you with any kind of spacetime magic."

"That's... entirely fair."

"Still," said Sunset, "not bad as the time I almost destroyed two universes."

"Huh. You know, Twilight said something similar. Uh, the real Twilight." Starlight gasped. "Other! Other Twilight!"

Twilight—who Starlight saw as no more or less real than any other Twilight, really—just smiled. "We've had this discussion before. She and I just use P-Twilight. Can't seem to get anyone else to, though."

Sunset shrugged. "Only one of you is a princess." She turned back to Starlight. "Come on. We'll take you to Rarity's. I'll tell you all about it while she makes you something more comfortable."

"That sounds nice." Starlight squirmed. "This thing really itches. Thank you, for everything."

Sunset smiled. "Speaking from experience, you'll find that getting beaten by Twilight was one of the best things that ever happened to you."