Rainbow Road Trip

Princess Twilight Sparkle had been very busy assembling a complicated contraption that connected Princess Celestia’s book at one end to the no-longer-working portal mirror on the other end. She was trying to explain it to her friends, who were looking on in amazement. “… and the interval between the two points is defined as the square root of the sum of the squares of the separation between the points along the three spatial dimensions.”

Spike shook his head. “Say what now?”

“Duh,” said Pinkie Pie, who didn’t understand what was so confusing. She pointed at the book. “She’s gonna take the magic in here and put it in there.” With a flourish, she gestured to the mirror. “That will make the portal open up so that whenever she wants to, she can go from here to there. There to here. Here to there. There to here. Here to there. There to—”

“We get the idea,” interrupted Applejack.

“Now to see if it actually works!” Twilight pulled a lever and sparks immediately burst from the book and sent an electrical charge into the machine that slowly began making its way toward the mirror.

“Ooooh!”

“Ahhh!”

“Wow!”

The portal mirror was beginning to shimmer and glow!

Carefully, Twilight approached the mirror to test it. She placed her hoof on its reflective surface—and her hoof disappeared! She pulled it back. The machine was going to work!

“Don’t suppose we could join you this time around?” asked Applejack.

Twilight Sparkle shook her head. “Better not. It could make things confusing in Canterlot High if all of a sudden there were two of all of you.”

The ponies nodded in understanding.

“But I still get to go, right?” piped up Spike. “There isn’t another one of me at Canterlot High. And you never know when you might need your trusty assistant.”

Twilight smiled at her friend and held out her hand. Spike pumped his fist before taking it. “We won’t be gone long,” she said.

The girls hugged one another, and each of the ponies whispered special words of encouragement to the princess. They hoped she was up to defeating the Sirens. It was scary having her leave their world again.

“Ready, Spike?” asked Twilight Sparkle at last.

“Ready!”

The two stepped into the mirror together. Almost instantly, there was a flash of blinding white light. Streaks of rainbow colors blazed in all directions as Twilight and Spike were stretched and squashed and bent and transformed into another dimension. Sparks glittered in the throne room in Equestria. At the marble base of the Wondercolt statue, tiny, almost imperceptible rainbows began to emerge.

The human girls had been waiting and waiting since Sunset Shimmer sent her message. They were beginning to lose hope. Rainbow Dash kept wishing they would see something, anything. She studied the statue one last time and was about to suggest they give up when Twilight Sparkle, the teenage girl, and Spike, her pet dog, flew out of the portal and hit the ground with an enormous thud!

“Twilight!” shouted all the girls, rushing to their long-lost friend. There were hugs and squeals and tears.

Twilight was wobbly and a little bruised. “I’m back!” She dusted herself off. It wasn’t quite the entrance she had imagined making. Still, she’d made it, and that’s what mattered. “I’ve got some bad news about those new girls,” she said, almost at once. She noticed the worried glances her friends were exchanging. She hoped that it wasn’t too late.