“Look, sugar cube, we’re just worried about you, that’s all.”

“I’m fine!” Twilight said, her hoof cutting through the air. “This is just ridiculous! I don’t even know where you got the idea that teleportation worked like that in the first place! Why would it? That’s completely insane!”

Twilight’s friends rubbed their manes, looking shiftily from side to side on their crystalline thrones, avoiding Twilight’s gaze.

Twilight’s eye twitched. “Look, here, let me show you. I’ll just teleport across this room, then come back. If I was really killing myself by doing so, do you think I would just casually throw my life away like that?”

“Darling, we know you don’t think that it is dangerous, but, those books…” Rarity walked towards Twilight’s seat, extending a hoof towards her friend’s.

Twilight jerked her hoof away. “I don’t care about what those books say! They were probably written by ponies who couldn’t teleport anyway. Here, just watch.” Twilight’s horn began to glow, and the world turned white.

---

Twilight Sparkle stuck her tongue out of the corner of her mouth, eying the cards hovering in front of her snout.

“Got any eights?” she asked the purple unicorn seated across the table from her.

“Go fish,” Twilight Sparkle said, smirking.

“Nuts.” Twilight’s horn lit up, sliding another card from the table into her clump of cards with her magic.

“Got any eights?” a third Twilight asked from her right.

“Ugh! Yes.” Twilight Sparkle’s horn glowed as she flicked three cards to her doppelganger, who quickly set them down on the silvery table.

Twilight Sparkle slumped onto the table as her other self celebrated, turning her head to look across the room. Spread out across the room were dozens of nearly identical alicorns and unicorns playing various games – chess, darts, go, poker, and even some strange game with papery bits that kept being traded between the players, all on the same marble floors and gilded table, with a beautiful view of blue skies above the clouds outside of the windows. “This sucks. Why aren’t there any books?”

“Well, you know my theory,” unicorn-Twilight said, looking down at her own cards with a furrowed brow.

Twilight grumbled into the table. “I’ve been to Tartarus. There isn’t nearly enough lava for us to be there.”

Unicorn Twilight shook her head. “But you didn’t see any ponies when you were there.

“Well, technically, she never went there,” one of the other alicorns at the table said.

“Well neither did you.”

“Girls, do we have to argue about this every time?”

The purple ponies all fell silent.

“I can’t believe we all got the same room,” unicorn Twilight muttered.

The Twilight with her head on the table opened her mouth to respond before a sound caught her attention. Her ears perked as the great pearly doors that barred entry to the room creaked open, admitting a pair of scowling alicorns into the room. Twilight lifted her head, exchanging a glance with her fellows before rising and trotting over to the newcomers.

“What happened to you two?”

The two alicorns exchanged a glance and grumbled.

“Teleportation demonstration.”