We both breathed long sighs of relief and shared a smile. After a silent moment, I suppressed a chuckle. “You realize what this means, right?”

She narrowed her gaze into a playful glare.

I let my smile slink into a grin.

She frowned. “Come on! Really? After that?”

“Hey, you’re the one who wanted to go double or nothing,” I chided.

Slumping back in acknowledgment of her defeat, she frowned. “Later? Can we eat first? Our food should be right when we left it.”

“Alright,” I said with a nod, “I’m pretty hungry, anyway.”

In an uncaring swirl of temporal nonsense, we were both whisked right into our ignorance. We sat back down at the table and leered hungrily at our still-steaming food, not noticing the retrospectively obvious oddity. The steam didn’t move right. Then the waiter trotted backwards to our table, turned to face us, picked up our plates, and trotted backwards away from us. He carried our food back into the kitchen.

We were both too dumbfounded to say anything. Trixie caught on first. She jumped up and galloped to the window. Motioning me over without taking her eyes off the moon, she realized what we’d done. I was a little slower on the uptake and needed her to point at it and glare at me for a bit before I figured out what she was trying to tell me.

The moon was moving backwards, and a faint hint of sunlight sparkled on the horizon. Some of the other ponies in the restaurant gawked at us briefly before calmly ejecting food from their throats to their plates. Trixie blinked us out of there and over to a secluded hilltop where we could freak out in peace. After a few decidedly unpeaceful minutes thereof, the sun rose. From the west.

“Okay,” Trixie said, “so time is flowing backwards. That’s... not a disaster, right?”

I shrugged. “Are you sure we aren’t the backwards ones?”

She dragged an exasperated hoof down her face. “Trixie doesn’t think there’s any way to tell. Forward and backward are relative.”

The sun kept rising, gradually brightening the night. Day. Whichever. I looked around us at the swaying grass and the drifting clouds. “Sure,” I said with a nod. “So, it doesn’t matter then, right? If we just reverse ourselves, we’ll go the same direction as everything else and we won’t know the difference.”

Trixie slumped to the ground and covered her head with her hooves. “Trixie doesn’t know how to reverse time.”

I blinked. “Oh. Well maybe we can ask somepony like Twilight for help?”

Trixie moved a hoof out of the way and looked up at me. “Can you speak and understand backwards?”

“No.” I hung my head.

“Trixie will just have to get practicing,” she mumbled into the dirt.

I pulled the door shut behind me as Trixie and I stepped out into the street. “That Twilight is too smart for her own good.”

“Trixie is just as smart,” she growled, “and if Trixie spent all her time in a library, she could be just as knowledgeable.”

“Easy, I didn’t say you weren’t,” I assured her. “I’m just saying that Twilight is smarter than she’s prepared to handle. She’s just as likely to get herself into trouble as she is to do something worthwhile when she puts her brain to use.”

Trixie harrumphed. “Trixie supposes she can agree to that,” she spat with a flick of her tail.

“Now then, is that all we needed?”

“Trixie thinks she’s ready.”

I nodded. “Alright then. You flip us back and then we go settle things.”

“Settle things?” Trixie rolled her eyes. “Fine. Quadruple or nothing.”

I tossed her a smirk. “You can’t be serious.”

“Trixie doesn’t play games.”

“Alright then. Hope you’re ready to lose big.”

Trixie’s horn started to glow. “Trixie is prepared for whatever you throw at her, but she assures you that she won’t be losing anything today.” A soft light emanated from the orb in my bag, but I didn’t consciously notice and payed it no mind. With an audible pop, the world vanished in a blinding light. When I could finally see again, I strained my eyes squinting at the noonday sun over Canterlot, trying to determine which way it was moving. Trixie just glanced around the streets, noting that ponies were trotting forward rather than backward. She tapped me on the shoulder and pointed them out to me.

I grinned sheepishly. “Well that didn’t seem too hard.”

“Nothing is too hard for the Great and Powerful Trixie!” she shouted, standing on her hind hooves and throwing her forehooves into the air. Some fireworks went off. Neither of us really noticed the sun sliding ever so slowly backwards.