Equestria Girl: The Other Side of the Mirror

[--Thunder Bolt-- 534]

In the Equestria Girls trailer, we see that each of Twilight's Mane Six friends has a counterpart in the HumanVerse.  What happened to Twilight's human self?  This is her story.

 

Author's Note:  This story is a fanfic based on the Equestria Girls trailers.  It is very likely to be contradicted by details of the movie.  I continue on, in regal indifference.

 

Chapter 1: Through the Looking Glass

 

"Oh.  My.  God.  Have you seen the crown they're giving for Princess of the Fall this year?  It's like, the. Best.  Crown.  Ever!  It looks so real, like real gold and gems and..."

 

Ugh.  I tried not to roll my eyes.  I really tried.  The whole, 'Oooooh, I wanna be a sparkly, sparkly princess!' thing is cute, I guess--for six year-olds.  But here I am, in high school, with people who are supposed to be doing things like getting ready for jobs or college out in the real world...people who, you know, have access to things like history books, and ought to know that feudal tyranny sucked.  Royally.  Buuuuut--that's all anybody's talking about, this stupid 'Princess of the Fall' thing.  Oh, and 'Princess of the Fall'?  Really?  Really?!  That means they're probably gonna have a Princess of the Winter, and Spring, and Summer, too, right?  Add in Homecoming and Prom, and the Princess Popularity Contest thing will never go away. 

 

I hate this school already.  Hate.  Miss Celeste said I ought to try to make friends here?  That'll happen, in a place that's designed to make sure people like me are shunned as much as possible.  Because, how do you win a 'princess' crown?  By being the most 'in' of the 'in-crowd.'  And how do you define yourself as 'in?'  By defining somebody else as 'out,' and making their life miserable, that's how.  A Prada heel stamping on a human face, forever.

 

I picked up speed and ignored the Mannequins and their princess-princess-princess monkey chatter.  They looked me over as I passed, and I could just feel their targeting reticules locking on.  *bip-bip-bip-beeeeeeee...*   "Oh, looks like somebody won't be in the running for Princess of the Fall," one of them said with a chuckle.  You got that right.  OK.  I could complain about how the popular girls in whatever school I go to treat me.  But...I guess I do have a role in bringing it on myself.  See, I could just go ahead and dress like they do and talk like they do and pretend I'm not interested in anything that doesn't come out of a fashion mag or celebrity gossip Twitter feeds.  Or I could dress in your basic jeans-and-T-shirt urban camouflage. 

 

But I'm not gonna let them decide how I manifest.  I define my own style, different from theirs, or Generic American Standard, on purpose.  So, I've got purple and fuschia stripes in my hair, and I wear a kit-bash of retro clothes:  A light blue Steampunkish Victorian-style blouse with puffy shoulders and a fuschia bow-tie.  A pleated poodle skirt, except instead of a poodle, my Sigil--two six-rayed stars placed on top of each other and canted to define the vertices of the Merkaba and Buckminster Fuller's Vector Equilibrium (or, "cuboctahedron" in common parlance), which are related to the esoteric Flower of Life diagram and the twelve-around-one configuration that results from the closest-packing of spheres.  Of course, nobody but me knows that, as it just looks like six-rayed stars, and they're not looking at it three-dimensionally anyway.  This is surrounded by five more, smaller six-rayed stars, forming a pentagon.  If you draw a five-pointed star inside a regular pentagon, each line of the star will be cut by another line at the ratio of phi, a unique ratio in which the smaller part is to the larger part as the larger part is to the whole, which is geometry's way of expressing the Hermetic Dictum.  Phi shows up everywhere in nature.  In human anatomy--just look at Leonardo's Vitruvian Man--in the Fibonnacci spirals of nautilus shells, hurricanes, and galaxies...let's just say my Sigil carries a lot of meaning for me, OK?  Anyway, I finish my wardrobe off with argyle '80's style leg-warmers and Disco-era platform boots.  I am not bound by Time.  Hehe.

 

So I'm weird.  With a name like 'Twila Sparks,' I don't exactly have the option of blending in.  So why not just decide who I am, and be that?  Sorry Miss Celeste, but that means I'm just going to have take a pass on the whole 'try to make some friends' thing.  Besides, I've seen too many people crying in the girls' room because their 'friend' stabbed them in the back to think it's even worth it to play the popularity game.

 

I turn the corner, and see a clot of people crowded around the school's trophy case.  Huh?  Oh.  It's all girls.  The stupid crown.  I consider trying to get to the other wing of the building some other way, just so I don't have to hear one more word about crowns and princesses and who's gonna win and who's going with whom to the big dance.  But I'm following a map, and not a very good one at that.  It looks like there is no shorter way, and for all I know, I might get lost.  Besides...morbid curiosity is kinda overtaking me.  I guess I might as well have a look at the thing.  So I head over, careful not to bump into anybody and draw attention to myself.  I look up.  The trophy case is tall, and the crown is on the top shelf, so being in the back doesn't keep me from seeing it.

 

I'm stunned.  Completely gobsmacked.  Mind:  Blown.

 

It does not look like some silvered-tin-and-rhinestones High School princess crown.  I can see by the way it dents the pillow it's on, that it has weight.  Nothing particularly special about the design, a thick gold band in your basic tiara shape, with some spirals in gold filigree, and nine sapphire cabochon stones across the front.  But it was apparently made to look old.  You know how, if you look at some ancient treasure, like a Scythian horse figurine, or King Tutankhamun's mask, you can tell it's old, even though it's in perfect condition?  It's subtle things, like the little hints of hand-craftsmanship instead of machine make, subtle differences in the color of the gold because ancient people didn't produce gold artifacts to the karat standards we use today, a certain patina of age.  This crown was like that.  Like it had been worn.  By a real princess.  Who, asked to produce a crown for a High School popularity contest, would forge an antiquity?  Making forged 'ancient' artifacts that look convincing is hard.  Just ask whoever made those 'lead codices' awhile back, about how quickly they were exposed.  So why go to the extra trouble? 

 

That's not what shocked me the most though.  At the crown's capital, its centerpiece: a large faceted gem, carved into the shape of a six-rayed star.  In the exact same shade of fuschia as the main star of my Sigil!  Somebody must have opened a door or something, reflecting light toward it off a glass panel, because I swear, the thing sparkled at me.  Like, there should have been a 'blllling!' sound effect or something.

 

I believe in, and practice, magick, with a 'k.'  No, I can't turn anybody into a toad.  It doesn't work that way.  Obviously.  Sometimes magick is defined as 'the art and science of changing consciousness in accordance with Will.'  I think that's about right, but that doesn't mean that magick is just psychology.  Look, if you go to some place like Chartres Cathedral, the Parthenon, or the Temple of Luxor, you know you're on holy ground, even if you don't know a thing about the God or gods they were built for.  The people who designed those places knew that certain proportions, geometric forms and shapes of volume in space nudge the human mind toward certain states of mind, and they built their temples the way they did intentionally.  I could point you to Michael S. Schneider's A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe, or if you want to go really deep, The Temple of Man by R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz.  There's actually hundreds of books about this stuff.

 

About magick, it's also been said that 'It's all in your head--but your head is bigger than you think.'  If the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics is right, then consciousness is what 'collapses the probability function,' what decides if Schrodinger's Cat is alive or dead.  And since it's probability functions all the way down...what if certain, highly-focused states of conscious attention can deliberately shift the probabilities that affect our lives?  And there's things like synchronicity, which I do try to pay attention to.  Seeing my Sigil on the top of the 'Fall Princess' crown had to be the biggest, most in-my-face synchronicity of my whole life.

 

No.  It can't be my 'destiny' to be the Fall Princess.  That's just...not me.  But as I'm standing there staring, I definitely feel a connection to that crown.  A bit off somehow, like a radio station coming in with some static...but the signal's getting through.  Could Miss Celeste have arranged all this somehow?  So I'd have a reason to take her advice and try to make friends?  But why?  She only met me yesterday when I enrolled.  She'd have seen my Sigil then--it's on all my outfits--and she seemed super perceptive, like she could look right through me, all the way down, and know...

 

I shake my head.  Time to clear out, before anybody notices I'm there.  Before they can get a chance to notice the Sigil on my skirt and on the Crown.  Yeah, I'm thinking of it with a capital-C now.  As I'm slipping away, I have to peel my eyes off the thing.  You know how I said that the builders of Luxor and Chartres to create feelings of holiness, power, and the presence of the numinous?  Well, I'm really getting the feeling that the Crown is an 'Object of Power.'  The way the other girls were staring at it, I bet they feel it too, just don't have the label to slap on the feeling. 

 

The most...well, pretty much the only rational explanation is that after I finished my enrollment forms, and Miss Celeste gave me the Understanding Look and said that I should try to make friends here, she called whoever she was having make the Crown and told them to make the centerpiece a six-rayed star.  But how did she get the color right?  On such short notice?  And that's if it hasn't been sitting there since before I came!  Why would a school principal go to that much expense and trouble, just to get one loner new girl to try to find friends instead of hiding in the library?  Because, even though the Crown has to be a fake, or a reproduction, it's a quality fake.  Museum-quality.  That kind of workmanship doesn't come quickly, or cheap.

 

...

 

OK, I admit it.  I spent the rest of the day thinking about the Crown.  Not the popularity contest, not the dance, or dresses, or figuring out how to get a guy to ask me, or any of the sparkle-princess crap.  The Crown.  What does it mean?  Now that I'm walking home and I don't have to think about classes, or staying off bullies' radar, I can concentrate on trying to open myself to the Mystery.  I feel connected to it somehow...but not in the 'I must have it, precious!  Preeeeeeeciiiiiouuuuuussss!' way.   Like it's not quite meant for me.  I can't try to win the thing, be the kind of girl who becomes a 'Princess of the Fall.'  Because that would be living a lie.  Maybe I could try to run as a spoof, 'Dark Sorceress' kinda thing: 'Princess of the Fall--of your doomed world, puny mortals!  BWAHAHAHAHAHAAA!'  *sigh*  Comedy isn't really my strong suit.  The pink chick, who must mainline Starbucks Double-Shots whenever nobody's looking, would kick my ass if she ran on laughs.  And there's no way I could afford to buy if off the winner.  It's gonna outshine all the other fake crowns in her trophy case put together.  

 

So if it's not meant for me, and how could it be...why the connection?   I start into a Walking Meditation.  Deep breaths, release thoughts and worries, and try for a state of complete openness to everything I sense and feel.  Not doing it very well, because, the Crown shouldn't have anything more to do with me than with Emperor Caligula's horse!  Who would be more likely to win the blasted thing!  Almost home.  When I get there, I'm gonna do a Google image search--

 

Bright light.

 

 

I'm falling.

 

 

Or being sucked upward.  Or both and neither.

 

 

Space and time are doing the Twist.

 

 

I'm screaming.

Relativity spiral.

Einstein, scratching his head.

 

A sense of compression...dilation

 

...

 

...

 

...

 

My eyes open, and try to blink away the blur.  I'm looking at...a street?  Paved in white brick?  I try to stand up, but the balance is all wrong, and I fall, catching myself with my hands.  *clopclop*  I lift my arm to look...at a severed stump.

 

AAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

 

No, it's an elephant foot...

 

...or a hoof?

 

I put it down and look at my other...hoof...that somehow matches my skin instead of...  I try to look at the rest of me.  Wh-u-u-uh?!  My head doesn't turn.  It swings around.  On an impossibly-long neck.

 

...And I'm looking at my Sigil.  On the...rear end...of a horse?  Sort-of-horse?  The legs are too thick, more like an elephant's but sleeker, and smooth.  WHAT'S MY SIGIL DOING ON THE BACK END OF A--

 

"Your Highness, are you alright?"

 

I try to spin around--swing my head--whatever.

 

Alien.  Horses.

 

Steampunk alien horses.  One with an honest-to-gorammit top hat, coat and bow tie--and a monocle!  Horse-monocle!  The other, with a right proper Victorian lady's fancy feathered hat and frilly...I dunno if I should call it a 'dress' or a 'saddle blanket.'  They're looking at me with these huge eyes, not horse-eyes, alien eyes, waaaay oversized for their heads like the gray humanoid 'aliens,' but not creepy, kinda adorable actually, and they're looking at me like they care about me, as if I'm somebody they know who matters to them and they're worried about me because they just heard me squeal like a little...girl?...and there's pretty little Disneyland-with-a-touch-of-Dali houses all around and WHAT did he just call me?!

Edited June 11, 2013 by InvisiblePinkUnicorn