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Organised by
RogerDodger
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2000–25000
Circles in Circles
“Listen, Rarity, I’m trying to tell you—”
“No, I’m trying to tell you!” Rarity huffed. “Get. Out.”
“But—”
“OUT.”
Rainbow Dash stepped back. “Sheesh, alright. Next time I wreck your stuff, I won’t offer to help out.”
Rarity’s lips sat in a grim line and her glare made Dash sweat.
She gulped, turned, and trotted out through the space where Carousel Boutique’s southern wall used to be. “Today’s off to a great start,” she muttered. Behind her, another chunk of plaster came loose and crashed into the pile of rubble. She winced at the sound, her head throbbing lightly, but she didn’t turn to look back. With a quick rumble, her stomach turned her head toward Sugarcube Corner. One good whiff of the smells wafting from there was all it took to change her course.
Pinkie leaned over, letting the tray of cupcakes slide off her back and onto the table. “So didja make that super neat skylight-on-the-wall at Rarity’s place? ‘Cuz I kinda love the idea and want something like that in my room.”
Dash raised an eyebrow. “Like a window?”
“Yeah! Just like a window!”
“Don’t you already have one?”
“Well of course I have a window, silly, but I want a skylight-on-the-wall!”
Dash let out a small chuckle and picked up a blue cupcake topped with lighter blue frosting. It smelled somehow like the opposite of blueberries, whatever that might be. She paused and raised her eyebrow again. “How did you hear about what happened at Rarity’s? That was like, ten minutes ago, tops.”
“Oh Dashie, Dashie, Dashie,” Pinkie said, trailing off into a giggle. “How couldn’t I have heard it? The noise was as loud as a Sonic Rainboom!”
“That’s... eh, not what I meant.”
Pinkie blinked.
“You know what? Nevermind. Right now I just need to get some food in me and figure out what I’m gonna do today,” Dash replied, biting into the moist, flaky blue treat. She smiled as she chewed, and Pinkie beamed right back.
She swallowed the tasty blue hunk of indeterminate flavor and rubbed at the back of her head. “I feel like I’m forgetting something important. Something I’m supposed to be doing, maybe?”
Pinkie tapped a hoof against her chin and grinned. “Maybe you were gonna go to a rave! Or the Museum of Chocolate! Or a chocolate rave!”
“Nah, raves are too cramped and museums are really more Twilight’s thing.” She brought the cupcake to her lips again and stopped just before taking another bite, pulling it a few inches back. “Actually, it might have something to do with Twilight. I think when I’m done here I’ll head over to her place. Thanks.”
“For maybe reminding you of what you might be forgetting?”
“Um... I’m gonna go with yes.”
“So if for some reason equines are in fact intrinsically connected to this other dimensional axis, and all their momentum is divided between the traditional three and this mysterious fourth one, then they technically are travelling at speeds near c and we’ll see different times between the two watches!”
Dash blinked. “You lost me. A while ago.”
Twilight laughed and looped the second watch around Dash’s neck. The first one dangled from the end of a chain coming out of a small brass ball fastened to her side. A red, round button shone on the top of the ball.
“It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to understand one word of the theory to help me out - and thank you again for taking the time - all you have to do is push the button and keep accelerating.”
Dash tossed Twilight a salute and vaulted into the air. “So just, like, a few laps around Ponyville should be good?”
“Yes.” Twilight nodded. “Both watches are accurate to within three-eighths of a second. We’ll almost certainly get a result at this level of precision and your level of speed. You’re sure you can Rainboom on command, and keep up that speed for a little while?”
“No problem at all; I’ve been training non-stop for months, now,” Dash said with a wink. “Back in a jiffy.” She rocketed out the window with a snap of her wings and immediately curved toward the outer edge of the town. As she whipped past the last house before Fluttershy’s cottage, she brought a hoof up to the ball at her side and clicked the button. A mechanical series of ticks echoed out from the ball and the chain started slowly lengthening, one link at a time.
She licked her lips and put the figurative pedal to the figurative metal, blasting into a Sonic Rainboom not twenty seconds later. The watch around her neck fluttered madly in the wild wind while the other drifted further away with each link, but plenty of chain remained coiled in the ball for her to spin around the outskirts three times without running out. With a satisfied smirk and a brief bout of panting for breath, Dash slowed to a stop and fluttered back toward the library.
Dash pirouetted through the same window she’d left from and spun gracefully to a halt on Twilight’s floor. She gave a mock bow and then pulled the chain unceremoniously through the window behind her, tugging the watch into view. She picked it up and peered at the face of it.
“Should I have like, pushed the button again to pull the watch back or something? I think it might be broken.”
Twilight rolled her eyes. “Are you going to listen if I explain the experiment again?”
“Probably not.”
“Then the short answer is no. You did perfect.” Twilight smiled softly and shifted her wings. “Thanks again for your help. I might have been able to get the results on my own, but it would’ve been a whole lot more challenging and I’d be completely wiped out from all the magic I would have to use to get going fast enough. Princess or not, I’m not even in your league when it comes to flight.”
Dash puffed her chest out a fraction and glanced at the watch again, deflating a bit. “I’m almost positive I was gone longer than two minutes.”
“It’s expected for the time on that watch to seem ‘wrong’ to you. I assure you it’s completely accurate,” Twilight said, snatching the watch from around Dash’s neck and flashing its face at her. “Does that seem more reasonable to you?”
Dash’s face scrunched up. “Yeah, but now I’m more confused.”
Twilight laughed again. “Alright, alright. The very very short version, then.” She cleared her throat and Dash planted her flank on the floor. “If you accelerate to a speed very close to the speed of light, then you’ll notice an effect where events take longer and longer to occur from your perspective than they do from the outside. Time sort of ‘stretches out’ for who, or what, ever is going that fast.”
“Well that’s cool, but I’m not that good. I haven’t gotten anywhere near the speed of light.”
“That’s not what the experiment was about. That’s well-established scientific fact. Today we were trying to investigate why time dilation seems to happen at speeds significantly lower than lightspeed, but only for ponies. If we just shoot an empty chariot across the sky we never notice the difference, but sufficiently speedy pegasi carrying watches sometimes notice slight discrepancies after longer flights and I want to explain why that is.”
Dash sat still for a moment, then shook her head and blinked. “Alright, so, uh, fast pegasi like me can gyrate time.”
“Dilate. And only locally, or so I hypothesize. I’m trying to confirm whether or not the time dilation is localized to a field of some relatively small size local to the pegasus. Just glancing at the times on these two watches tells me yes, but I need to do a whole lot of math to be sure.”
Her eyes swept around the room. “Anything else I can do to help?”
“Not that I’m complaining, but why are you so eager to see science prevail?”
She shrugged. “I dunno. Besides, Applejack’s out of town, so what else am I gonna do?”
A muffled gasp emanated up from the basement door. Twilight coughed loudly. “Ahem. I thought you were going to go with her. Did she go without you?”
Dash rubbed at the back of her head. “I think so. I was probably okay with it. I say and do a lot of things I don’t remember, either because I’m half asleep or because I go head-first into too many walls. Either way, I’m here and I don’t think she’s looking for me, so I’m going to assume we’re good unless she comes after me.”
“That doesn’t sound like a very good approach, but, well, I didn’t exactly get it when you two were at each other’s throats for that Iron Pony competition either. I guess whatever works for the two of you,” Twilight said with a roll of her shoulders. “If you’re up for it, you could gather more data while I work on this?”
“Sure. What do I gotta do?”
Twilight tried to hide a tremble. “Take another few laps around the town, but go even faster? Maybe an extra fifth or so?”
Dash shrugged again. “Alright. If nothing else, it’s some decent exercise,” she said before blasting out the window once more. Easily shattering her old records and throwing out yet another Rainboom, Dash pressed herself harder and screamed around Ponyville’s perimeter at a speed that would’ve been ludicrous even to her a year or two ago. She faltered near the window and tumbled into the library, sprawling against a wall.
Twilight blinked down at her in surprise. “Huh? Why are you back already? And what did you do with the equipment I gave you?”
She took a few shaky breaths and righted herself. “You mean... the watches? I already... gave ‘em back to you,” she wheezed. “You said... you needed to do some calculations, and told me to go faster.”
“No I didn’t. I mean, if it looked like I was right I might so I could test if...” her eyes widened. “Get in the basement and shut the door! I’ll be down to explain to you in a few minutes.”
“What’s going on?”
“Just do it! If you’re here when you get back, it could cause problems.”
Dash blinked. “What?”
“Go!” Twilight shouted, practically shoving her friend toward the stairs.
The door swung shut behind Rainbow Dash and she slumped against it rather than going into the lab and touching something Twilight wouldn’t want her to touch. She’d learned her lesson. After a few minutes, she thought she heard some conversation muffled by the door, so she pressed herself up to it, letting her ear brush against the solid surface. The thick wood did not conduct sound well at all, and so she could barely make out anything other than the fact that two or more ponies were talking; one said much more than the other(s).
Finally, she was certain the more talkative one was Twilight - though that should have been obvious - and that there were only two ponies. As she concentrated on the other voice and pressed harder against the door, she heard a very familiar, scratchy voice say that Applejack was out of town.
She gasped.
A minute or two later, the door flew open to reveal a hyperventilating Twilight. “We can’t do that again! I didn’t think that sufficient speed would actually reverse time for you! We can’t... we can’t do any more experiments with this. You can’t go that fast anymore.” She shivered. “I’ve messed with time travel before, and I don’t want any part of that ever again.”
Dash’s eyes had ballooned to a cartoonish size, dwarfing Twilight’s wide-eyed realization earlier, and she stared unblinking at Twilight for a moment.
“Are you listening to me? You can’t do that anymore. It’s way too dangerous!”
“I’m... I’m so fast,” Dash whispered, “I’m so fast I can go BACK IN TIME?”
Twilight held a hoof to her muzzle. “Shhh! No, you can’t! I mean, you can, but you can’t! Trust me, you don’t want to mess with the timestream. History can’t be changed, and you’ll only wind up hurting yourself trying!”
“Hang on, if history can’t be changed, then why can’t I try to mess with it? I can’t actually do any damage, right?”
“That’s not the point! Time is—”
Dash stamped a hoof. “Time is boring! I’m gonna try to spice it up a little, and I’m gonna fall back on you saying I couldn’t change anything as a justification to go nuts.”
“Rainbow—”
“Too late, already on my way to Awesometown!” she said as she flapped her wings and rose out of the window again. “Choo-choo!” she taunted as she turned to the horizon.
Twilight’s horn glimmered and the glow enveloped her wings as she began flying after her friend. She wasted no time and spared no energy pumping her wings as hard and as fast as she could, pouring as much magic as she could muster into herself.
For a moment, it worked and she followed closely behind Dash. Then, without warning, Rainbow Dash put the metaphorical pedal to and through the metaphorical metal, giving her all as she hadn’t needed to do in ages. One more of the day’s numerous Rainbooms echoed across the sky and sent Twilight tumbling backward in its wake.
A blinding flash of light caused Dash to slow down, spreading her wings wide in an effort to brake. Instead, her immense momentum and lack of focus threw her end-over-end in a twisting, spiraling mess. She did slow a considerable amount, but she didn’t stop as she sailed gracelessly through the air and into the side of Carousel Boutique - head first - plowing through the wall and taking most of it with her. She and the debris rolled across whatever Rarity had had near the wall and slid to a stop in the middle of the now-filthy room.
Dash started to rise, wobbled, fell, then tried again before she made it to her hooves. “What... what just happened?”
“My wall!” Rarity shrieked. “My projects!”
“Oh, hi Rarity,” Dash offered. “My head is killing me. I wipe out during some new trick? Whatever it was, it must’ve been wild!”
“You... you... you buffoon! You can’t even take a moment to consider where you’re practicing, can you? Did you think for one moment about what might happen? Did you think for even a single second about what you were doing?”
“I dunno. Look, I get that I broke your dresses or whatever, but I honestly can’t answer your questions right now because the room is still spinning.”
“Why you...” Rarity seethed, rubbing at her temples. “Please leave before I do something we both regret. I can’t deal with somepony as reckless and inconsiderate as you so clearly are at the moment!”
“I’ll help you clean up and pay you or whatever, I’m just saying to, nghh” Dash winced and rubbed at her head, “to not freak out so much right now. I literally can’t answer your questions, so this isn’t gonna help anypony.”
“Listen, Rarity, I’m trying to tell you—”
“No, I’m trying to tell you!” Rarity screamed. “Get. Out.”
“But—”
“OUT.”
“No, I’m trying to tell you!” Rarity huffed. “Get. Out.”
“But—”
“OUT.”
Rainbow Dash stepped back. “Sheesh, alright. Next time I wreck your stuff, I won’t offer to help out.”
Rarity’s lips sat in a grim line and her glare made Dash sweat.
She gulped, turned, and trotted out through the space where Carousel Boutique’s southern wall used to be. “Today’s off to a great start,” she muttered. Behind her, another chunk of plaster came loose and crashed into the pile of rubble. She winced at the sound, her head throbbing lightly, but she didn’t turn to look back. With a quick rumble, her stomach turned her head toward Sugarcube Corner. One good whiff of the smells wafting from there was all it took to change her course.
Pinkie leaned over, letting the tray of cupcakes slide off her back and onto the table. “So didja make that super neat skylight-on-the-wall at Rarity’s place? ‘Cuz I kinda love the idea and want something like that in my room.”
Dash raised an eyebrow. “Like a window?”
“Yeah! Just like a window!”
“Don’t you already have one?”
“Well of course I have a window, silly, but I want a skylight-on-the-wall!”
Dash let out a small chuckle and picked up a blue cupcake topped with lighter blue frosting. It smelled somehow like the opposite of blueberries, whatever that might be. She paused and raised her eyebrow again. “How did you hear about what happened at Rarity’s? That was like, ten minutes ago, tops.”
“Oh Dashie, Dashie, Dashie,” Pinkie said, trailing off into a giggle. “How couldn’t I have heard it? The noise was as loud as a Sonic Rainboom!”
“That’s... eh, not what I meant.”
Pinkie blinked.
“You know what? Nevermind. Right now I just need to get some food in me and figure out what I’m gonna do today,” Dash replied, biting into the moist, flaky blue treat. She smiled as she chewed, and Pinkie beamed right back.
She swallowed the tasty blue hunk of indeterminate flavor and rubbed at the back of her head. “I feel like I’m forgetting something important. Something I’m supposed to be doing, maybe?”
Pinkie tapped a hoof against her chin and grinned. “Maybe you were gonna go to a rave! Or the Museum of Chocolate! Or a chocolate rave!”
“Nah, raves are too cramped and museums are really more Twilight’s thing.” She brought the cupcake to her lips again and stopped just before taking another bite, pulling it a few inches back. “Actually, it might have something to do with Twilight. I think when I’m done here I’ll head over to her place. Thanks.”
“For maybe reminding you of what you might be forgetting?”
“Um... I’m gonna go with yes.”
“So if for some reason equines are in fact intrinsically connected to this other dimensional axis, and all their momentum is divided between the traditional three and this mysterious fourth one, then they technically are travelling at speeds near c and we’ll see different times between the two watches!”
Dash blinked. “You lost me. A while ago.”
Twilight laughed and looped the second watch around Dash’s neck. The first one dangled from the end of a chain coming out of a small brass ball fastened to her side. A red, round button shone on the top of the ball.
“It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to understand one word of the theory to help me out - and thank you again for taking the time - all you have to do is push the button and keep accelerating.”
Dash tossed Twilight a salute and vaulted into the air. “So just, like, a few laps around Ponyville should be good?”
“Yes.” Twilight nodded. “Both watches are accurate to within three-eighths of a second. We’ll almost certainly get a result at this level of precision and your level of speed. You’re sure you can Rainboom on command, and keep up that speed for a little while?”
“No problem at all; I’ve been training non-stop for months, now,” Dash said with a wink. “Back in a jiffy.” She rocketed out the window with a snap of her wings and immediately curved toward the outer edge of the town. As she whipped past the last house before Fluttershy’s cottage, she brought a hoof up to the ball at her side and clicked the button. A mechanical series of ticks echoed out from the ball and the chain started slowly lengthening, one link at a time.
She licked her lips and put the figurative pedal to the figurative metal, blasting into a Sonic Rainboom not twenty seconds later. The watch around her neck fluttered madly in the wild wind while the other drifted further away with each link, but plenty of chain remained coiled in the ball for her to spin around the outskirts three times without running out. With a satisfied smirk and a brief bout of panting for breath, Dash slowed to a stop and fluttered back toward the library.
Dash pirouetted through the same window she’d left from and spun gracefully to a halt on Twilight’s floor. She gave a mock bow and then pulled the chain unceremoniously through the window behind her, tugging the watch into view. She picked it up and peered at the face of it.
“Should I have like, pushed the button again to pull the watch back or something? I think it might be broken.”
Twilight rolled her eyes. “Are you going to listen if I explain the experiment again?”
“Probably not.”
“Then the short answer is no. You did perfect.” Twilight smiled softly and shifted her wings. “Thanks again for your help. I might have been able to get the results on my own, but it would’ve been a whole lot more challenging and I’d be completely wiped out from all the magic I would have to use to get going fast enough. Princess or not, I’m not even in your league when it comes to flight.”
Dash puffed her chest out a fraction and glanced at the watch again, deflating a bit. “I’m almost positive I was gone longer than two minutes.”
“It’s expected for the time on that watch to seem ‘wrong’ to you. I assure you it’s completely accurate,” Twilight said, snatching the watch from around Dash’s neck and flashing its face at her. “Does that seem more reasonable to you?”
Dash’s face scrunched up. “Yeah, but now I’m more confused.”
Twilight laughed again. “Alright, alright. The very very short version, then.” She cleared her throat and Dash planted her flank on the floor. “If you accelerate to a speed very close to the speed of light, then you’ll notice an effect where events take longer and longer to occur from your perspective than they do from the outside. Time sort of ‘stretches out’ for who, or what, ever is going that fast.”
“Well that’s cool, but I’m not that good. I haven’t gotten anywhere near the speed of light.”
“That’s not what the experiment was about. That’s well-established scientific fact. Today we were trying to investigate why time dilation seems to happen at speeds significantly lower than lightspeed, but only for ponies. If we just shoot an empty chariot across the sky we never notice the difference, but sufficiently speedy pegasi carrying watches sometimes notice slight discrepancies after longer flights and I want to explain why that is.”
Dash sat still for a moment, then shook her head and blinked. “Alright, so, uh, fast pegasi like me can gyrate time.”
“Dilate. And only locally, or so I hypothesize. I’m trying to confirm whether or not the time dilation is localized to a field of some relatively small size local to the pegasus. Just glancing at the times on these two watches tells me yes, but I need to do a whole lot of math to be sure.”
Her eyes swept around the room. “Anything else I can do to help?”
“Not that I’m complaining, but why are you so eager to see science prevail?”
She shrugged. “I dunno. Besides, Applejack’s out of town, so what else am I gonna do?”
A muffled gasp emanated up from the basement door. Twilight coughed loudly. “Ahem. I thought you were going to go with her. Did she go without you?”
Dash rubbed at the back of her head. “I think so. I was probably okay with it. I say and do a lot of things I don’t remember, either because I’m half asleep or because I go head-first into too many walls. Either way, I’m here and I don’t think she’s looking for me, so I’m going to assume we’re good unless she comes after me.”
“That doesn’t sound like a very good approach, but, well, I didn’t exactly get it when you two were at each other’s throats for that Iron Pony competition either. I guess whatever works for the two of you,” Twilight said with a roll of her shoulders. “If you’re up for it, you could gather more data while I work on this?”
“Sure. What do I gotta do?”
Twilight tried to hide a tremble. “Take another few laps around the town, but go even faster? Maybe an extra fifth or so?”
Dash shrugged again. “Alright. If nothing else, it’s some decent exercise,” she said before blasting out the window once more. Easily shattering her old records and throwing out yet another Rainboom, Dash pressed herself harder and screamed around Ponyville’s perimeter at a speed that would’ve been ludicrous even to her a year or two ago. She faltered near the window and tumbled into the library, sprawling against a wall.
Twilight blinked down at her in surprise. “Huh? Why are you back already? And what did you do with the equipment I gave you?”
She took a few shaky breaths and righted herself. “You mean... the watches? I already... gave ‘em back to you,” she wheezed. “You said... you needed to do some calculations, and told me to go faster.”
“No I didn’t. I mean, if it looked like I was right I might so I could test if...” her eyes widened. “Get in the basement and shut the door! I’ll be down to explain to you in a few minutes.”
“What’s going on?”
“Just do it! If you’re here when you get back, it could cause problems.”
Dash blinked. “What?”
“Go!” Twilight shouted, practically shoving her friend toward the stairs.
The door swung shut behind Rainbow Dash and she slumped against it rather than going into the lab and touching something Twilight wouldn’t want her to touch. She’d learned her lesson. After a few minutes, she thought she heard some conversation muffled by the door, so she pressed herself up to it, letting her ear brush against the solid surface. The thick wood did not conduct sound well at all, and so she could barely make out anything other than the fact that two or more ponies were talking; one said much more than the other(s).
Finally, she was certain the more talkative one was Twilight - though that should have been obvious - and that there were only two ponies. As she concentrated on the other voice and pressed harder against the door, she heard a very familiar, scratchy voice say that Applejack was out of town.
She gasped.
A minute or two later, the door flew open to reveal a hyperventilating Twilight. “We can’t do that again! I didn’t think that sufficient speed would actually reverse time for you! We can’t... we can’t do any more experiments with this. You can’t go that fast anymore.” She shivered. “I’ve messed with time travel before, and I don’t want any part of that ever again.”
Dash’s eyes had ballooned to a cartoonish size, dwarfing Twilight’s wide-eyed realization earlier, and she stared unblinking at Twilight for a moment.
“Are you listening to me? You can’t do that anymore. It’s way too dangerous!”
“I’m... I’m so fast,” Dash whispered, “I’m so fast I can go BACK IN TIME?”
Twilight held a hoof to her muzzle. “Shhh! No, you can’t! I mean, you can, but you can’t! Trust me, you don’t want to mess with the timestream. History can’t be changed, and you’ll only wind up hurting yourself trying!”
“Hang on, if history can’t be changed, then why can’t I try to mess with it? I can’t actually do any damage, right?”
“That’s not the point! Time is—”
Dash stamped a hoof. “Time is boring! I’m gonna try to spice it up a little, and I’m gonna fall back on you saying I couldn’t change anything as a justification to go nuts.”
“Rainbow—”
“Too late, already on my way to Awesometown!” she said as she flapped her wings and rose out of the window again. “Choo-choo!” she taunted as she turned to the horizon.
Twilight’s horn glimmered and the glow enveloped her wings as she began flying after her friend. She wasted no time and spared no energy pumping her wings as hard and as fast as she could, pouring as much magic as she could muster into herself.
For a moment, it worked and she followed closely behind Dash. Then, without warning, Rainbow Dash put the metaphorical pedal to and through the metaphorical metal, giving her all as she hadn’t needed to do in ages. One more of the day’s numerous Rainbooms echoed across the sky and sent Twilight tumbling backward in its wake.
A blinding flash of light caused Dash to slow down, spreading her wings wide in an effort to brake. Instead, her immense momentum and lack of focus threw her end-over-end in a twisting, spiraling mess. She did slow a considerable amount, but she didn’t stop as she sailed gracelessly through the air and into the side of Carousel Boutique - head first - plowing through the wall and taking most of it with her. She and the debris rolled across whatever Rarity had had near the wall and slid to a stop in the middle of the now-filthy room.
Dash started to rise, wobbled, fell, then tried again before she made it to her hooves. “What... what just happened?”
“My wall!” Rarity shrieked. “My projects!”
“Oh, hi Rarity,” Dash offered. “My head is killing me. I wipe out during some new trick? Whatever it was, it must’ve been wild!”
“You... you... you buffoon! You can’t even take a moment to consider where you’re practicing, can you? Did you think for one moment about what might happen? Did you think for even a single second about what you were doing?”
“I dunno. Look, I get that I broke your dresses or whatever, but I honestly can’t answer your questions right now because the room is still spinning.”
“Why you...” Rarity seethed, rubbing at her temples. “Please leave before I do something we both regret. I can’t deal with somepony as reckless and inconsiderate as you so clearly are at the moment!”
“I’ll help you clean up and pay you or whatever, I’m just saying to, nghh” Dash winced and rubbed at her head, “to not freak out so much right now. I literally can’t answer your questions, so this isn’t gonna help anypony.”
“Listen, Rarity, I’m trying to tell you—”
“No, I’m trying to tell you!” Rarity screamed. “Get. Out.”
“But—”
“OUT.”