First some notes and meta stuff:
There are a lot of stories that imagine the Equestria Girls characters meeting the human Twilight Sparkle early (canonically she isn't encountered until movie three.) This fragment has Sunset Shimmer meeting her between the first and second movie, and features an explanation for "I've already met someone with your name who looks just like you," that I've never seen anyone use.
In theory, you shouldn't need to know anything about Equestria Girls to understand this. In practice it probably helps to know that it's a setting in which individuals in one world have identical-ish duplicates in another and Princess Twilight Sparkle visited the Equestria Girls world for three days before returning to her own.
Now it's story time.
"Twilight?" Sunset asked. Well, 'asked' was probably an overly charitable description of what Sunset did. It wasn't a question so much as befuddlement given form.
It had been less than a moon since the Fall Formal, making it more than twenty nine moons till the portal opened again. Not proper moons, mind you, it was the position of the moon in the stars that mattered rather than the phase. It made the math more difficult to do in one's head simply because the mind cried out that a moon was slightly more than twenty nine and a half days, certainly not a mere twenty seven days and change, and consequently there was a constant threat of switching units mid calculation.
Still, she'd done the math repeatedly; she'd memorized it: two years, eighty nine days --eighty eight if one of the years happened to be a leap year-- fifteen hours, thirty five and three quarters minutes.
Every one of those numbers meant one thing and one thing only: Twilight Sparkle couldn't be here. It was literally impossible. And yet . . . here she was. Here she was in a mall of all places. Why would a Princess of Equestria violate the laws of reality to come to a human mall?
It made no sense, hence the befuddlement.
That Twilight hadn't seen fit to notify Sunset of her return, on the other hand, made perfect sense. Sunset was the monster who mind controlled the student body and tried to kill Twilight. The princess had been merciful in condemning her to mere exile, and exile as a form of probation with the expectation of rehabilitation no less, but that in no way meant she'd make Sunset privy to her travel plans.
For her part, Twilight was quite quiet. In fact, she seemed to be in some form of shock. She probably hadn't expected to see Sunset, and certainly not to encounter her alone. While Sunset considered how to put Twilight at ease, a bow perhaps to show proper deference-- Twilight composed herself and spoke.
It was not the voice of authority that had characterized their previous meeting, then again, Sunset wasn't a smoking mess at the bottom of a crater this time. It was the words, more than the tone, that surprised Sunset. Twilight said, "How do you know my name."
It didn't feel like a noble indicating that she was so far above a nothing like Sunset as to--
And then it hit Sunset.
"Oh," Sunset said, drawing the word out for longer than a single syllable had any right to stretch. "You 're--" and that was as far as Sunset got before she realized that she had no idea what to say in this situation. They'd never talked about what to do in the event of meeting the Princess's double. Based on what Twilight's friends had told her, between "No offence"s, and Pinkie Pie's "Just a hunch"ing, Sunset figured that they weren't likely to meet this Twilight.
Human Celestia was, at best, unlikely to order human Twilight to leave the city of her birth and journey to an unfamilar place as part of of a Xanthos gambit to redeem Nightmare moon. This was true for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being that human Luna didn't need redemption. The fact that human Celestia didn't actually know human Twilight was a distant second.
Regardless, this was a time for thinking on one's feet. It was time for creativity and ingenuity. It was, in short, time for making shit up. Lying, to put it bluntly.
"Ok, so, this is probably gonna sound really bad at first," Sunset said, "but I promise you that it isn't and, regardless, the situation is over."
Twilight, whom Sunset had decided to dub 'Glasses Twilight' because of the thick black glasses Sunset had somehow managed to not notice at first, looked even more uneasy, which was to be expected at this point.
"All of CHS--" Sunset realized she might have to say what that stood for, "uh, that is, Can--"
Glasses Twilight said, "Canterlot High School," with an air of 'Don't treat me like I'm ignorant,' then, a moment later, added, "I've . . . heard of it," with a good deal less confidence.
"Yeah," Sunset said. "That. Everyone at CHS thinks they already know you."
What followed was, by far, the loudest, "What‽" Sunset had ever heard in her life. It made Sunset acutely aware of their location: a crowded mall. A crowded Mall where everyone was now looking at them.
Glasses Twilight seemed to remember that as well, quickly looked around, somehow managed to make herself smaller through a combination of bad posture and embarrassment, and finally made Sunset worry that a panic attack was imminent.
Sunset drew out the word, "So," considered that drawing out single syllable words might be a nervous tic on her part, and said, "maybe we should go someplace less public."
Glasses Twilight nodded vigorously.
"Is there anywhere that makes you feel comfortable?"
Soon they were in a used book store. The air smelled the good kind of musty: the almond odor of benzaldehyde, the vanilla of vanillin, the sweet aroma of toluene and ethyl benzene, the floral touches of 2-ethyl hexanol. These books were well aged, and it smelled like they'd been a good vintage to begin with.
Modern humans just didn't leave enough lignin in their paper; it never smelled right.
After breathing deeply for a bit, Glasses Twilight said, "Alright, I'm ready to talk."
Sunset nodded and said, "Ok."
"Why does everyone at a school I've never set foot in know my name?"
"A few weeks ago CHS had a visitor who was . . ." Sunset paused to think. She didn't need to lie for this part, and the best lies were the ones that diverged from the truth only when necessary, but she did need to phrase this well. "Well, let's just say she wasn't from around here."
Glasses Twilight raised an eyebrow and asked, "You had an undocumented immigrant at your school?"
Sunset gaped.
"The only reason you'd be cagey about where this person came from is if the knowledge become public could have a deleterious effect," Glasses Twilight said. Sunset was used to that kind of deduction being delivered in a threatening manner. Glasses Twilight had done nothing of the sort. It was purely analytical. There was no more menace than if Glasses Twilight were explaining how she'd come to realize that the logarithmic spiral is scale invariant.
"Yes," Sunset said. So very much, yes. "It wasn't just her presence in-country that was undocumented. On paper she didn't exist. She did, however, look just--"
"Like me," Glasses Twilight said. It was . . . it wasn't quite angry, but there was a hardness to her words. "You're telling me --expecting me to believe-- that someone who looked exactly like me just appeared out of the blue."
Sunset took a deep breath. This was where the lying came in. "Is it really so hard to believe that a newcomer to a city the size of Canterlot could find someone who looked like her?"
Princess Twilight didn't find anyone. She didn't look. It was sheer luck that no one at CHS had known this Twilight, and the only person who recognized that there were two Twilight in the city was the one person at school who'd immediately assume that it was a case of twin girls with twin dogs.
Glasses Twilight, of course, didn't know any of that. She just knew that Sunset claimed Princess Twilight had set out to find someone who looked like her. Reframing at it's best, Sunset hoped.
Glasses Twilight thought it over for a bit, then seemed to deflate. "I guess when you put it that way . . ." she said.
"You were begging the question?" Sunset asked.
Glasses Twilight's eyes lit up, and she asked, "You know what that actually means?" with a sort of awe.
Sunset smirked. Then she said, "Well, let's consider this conversation, or rather the meeting that precipitated it." She adopted a playfully overblown style for the question, "What are the odds that this happened by random chance? What. Are. The. Odds?"
After a suitably dramatic pause, she shifted into a conspiratorial mode of speech for the rest, "I'm just one person among so many in the city, this is just one day out of infinite, and this mall is but one place in the whole of Canterlot. The chances of you meeting me (of all people), today (of all days), and doing it here (of all places) are so very negligibly low that this can't be random."
Glasses Twilight snorted, Sunset continued, "Maybe it's destiny, maybe it's fate, maybe it's a conspiracy, but someone or something wanted this meeting to take place. It's the only reasonable explanation for how something so astronomically unlikely could have actually happened."
"You're not saying it was aliens," Glasses Twilight said.
"But it was aliens," Sunset said.
"And, of course, it all depends on assuming the end result was predetermined," Glasses Twilight said, "the odds of me meeting someone on some day in some place aren't low at all. It's only if we assume it had to be you, it had to be here, and it had to be now when it seems unlikely to be random."
Sunset nodded. This was going well. "Someone's got to win the lottery. Not every time, of course, but if enough people play . . ."
"And given the population of the planet," Glasses Twilight said, "if the odds of something happening to a random person on a random day are one in a million. . ."
"It happens seventy seven hundred times a day," Sunset said.
Glasses Twilight looked around. Sunset did too. There were no signs they'd be kicked out of the bookstore anytime soon.
After taking a deep breath then letting it out, Glasses Twilight said, "So someone came to your school, and --probably unsurprisingly-- there was someone in Canterlot she resembled, and I happened to be that person."
"Pretty much," Sunset said, "if you switched to contacts and let your hair down, you'd be one wardrobe change away from being indistinguishable."
"And she stole my identity," Glasses Twilight said with a touch of anger in her voice.
Sunset looked away. This was the hard part. Maybe it had seemed like getting Glasses Twilight to believe this was a case of mundane similarity would be the hard part --then again, maybe it hadn't; Sunset didn't remember-- but this was the real hard part. Princess Twilight had saved Sunset, and now Sunset was accusing her of a crime she didn't commit. Again, no less.
"This all started with you knowing my name," Glasses Twilight said. "Ergo, she took my name."
"Remember how I said it wasn't as bad as it seems?" Sunset asked.
"And because of that an entire school of people I've never met think they know me." The anger had grown significantly.
"She didn't mean any harm," Sunset said. "She was here for three days, two nights, and she wanted to blend in."
"By stealing my . . ." Glasses Twilight faltered. "My . . ." again she stopped.
"No one at CHS had ever met you," Sunset said.
Glasses Twilight near-shouted, "That's not--"
"She needed a place to stay," Sunset said.
"That's not the--" Glasses Twilight stopped. All of the anger disappeared in an instant.
Sunset pondered whether emotional whiplash were just an expression, or something Glasses Twilight might have to worry about.
"A place to stay?" Glasses Twilight asked with nothing but concern.
"She slept in the school library," Sunset said.
There are a lot of stories that imagine the Equestria Girls characters meeting the human Twilight Sparkle early (canonically she isn't encountered until movie three.) This fragment has Sunset Shimmer meeting her between the first and second movie, and features an explanation for "I've already met someone with your name who looks just like you," that I've never seen anyone use.
In theory, you shouldn't need to know anything about Equestria Girls to understand this. In practice it probably helps to know that it's a setting in which individuals in one world have identical-ish duplicates in another and Princess Twilight Sparkle visited the Equestria Girls world for three days before returning to her own.
Now it's story time.
⁂
"Twilight?" Sunset asked. Well, 'asked' was probably an overly charitable description of what Sunset did. It wasn't a question so much as befuddlement given form.
It had been less than a moon since the Fall Formal, making it more than twenty nine moons till the portal opened again. Not proper moons, mind you, it was the position of the moon in the stars that mattered rather than the phase. It made the math more difficult to do in one's head simply because the mind cried out that a moon was slightly more than twenty nine and a half days, certainly not a mere twenty seven days and change, and consequently there was a constant threat of switching units mid calculation.
Still, she'd done the math repeatedly; she'd memorized it: two years, eighty nine days --eighty eight if one of the years happened to be a leap year-- fifteen hours, thirty five and three quarters minutes.
Every one of those numbers meant one thing and one thing only: Twilight Sparkle couldn't be here. It was literally impossible. And yet . . . here she was. Here she was in a mall of all places. Why would a Princess of Equestria violate the laws of reality to come to a human mall?
It made no sense, hence the befuddlement.
That Twilight hadn't seen fit to notify Sunset of her return, on the other hand, made perfect sense. Sunset was the monster who mind controlled the student body and tried to kill Twilight. The princess had been merciful in condemning her to mere exile, and exile as a form of probation with the expectation of rehabilitation no less, but that in no way meant she'd make Sunset privy to her travel plans.
For her part, Twilight was quite quiet. In fact, she seemed to be in some form of shock. She probably hadn't expected to see Sunset, and certainly not to encounter her alone. While Sunset considered how to put Twilight at ease, a bow perhaps to show proper deference-- Twilight composed herself and spoke.
It was not the voice of authority that had characterized their previous meeting, then again, Sunset wasn't a smoking mess at the bottom of a crater this time. It was the words, more than the tone, that surprised Sunset. Twilight said, "How do you know my name."
It didn't feel like a noble indicating that she was so far above a nothing like Sunset as to--
And then it hit Sunset.
"Oh," Sunset said, drawing the word out for longer than a single syllable had any right to stretch. "You 're--" and that was as far as Sunset got before she realized that she had no idea what to say in this situation. They'd never talked about what to do in the event of meeting the Princess's double. Based on what Twilight's friends had told her, between "No offence"s, and Pinkie Pie's "Just a hunch"ing, Sunset figured that they weren't likely to meet this Twilight.
Human Celestia was, at best, unlikely to order human Twilight to leave the city of her birth and journey to an unfamilar place as part of of a Xanthos gambit to redeem Nightmare moon. This was true for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being that human Luna didn't need redemption. The fact that human Celestia didn't actually know human Twilight was a distant second.
Regardless, this was a time for thinking on one's feet. It was time for creativity and ingenuity. It was, in short, time for making shit up. Lying, to put it bluntly.
"Ok, so, this is probably gonna sound really bad at first," Sunset said, "but I promise you that it isn't and, regardless, the situation is over."
Twilight, whom Sunset had decided to dub 'Glasses Twilight' because of the thick black glasses Sunset had somehow managed to not notice at first, looked even more uneasy, which was to be expected at this point.
"All of CHS--" Sunset realized she might have to say what that stood for, "uh, that is, Can--"
Glasses Twilight said, "Canterlot High School," with an air of 'Don't treat me like I'm ignorant,' then, a moment later, added, "I've . . . heard of it," with a good deal less confidence.
"Yeah," Sunset said. "That. Everyone at CHS thinks they already know you."
What followed was, by far, the loudest, "What‽" Sunset had ever heard in her life. It made Sunset acutely aware of their location: a crowded mall. A crowded Mall where everyone was now looking at them.
Glasses Twilight seemed to remember that as well, quickly looked around, somehow managed to make herself smaller through a combination of bad posture and embarrassment, and finally made Sunset worry that a panic attack was imminent.
Sunset drew out the word, "So," considered that drawing out single syllable words might be a nervous tic on her part, and said, "maybe we should go someplace less public."
Glasses Twilight nodded vigorously.
"Is there anywhere that makes you feel comfortable?"
Soon they were in a used book store. The air smelled the good kind of musty: the almond odor of benzaldehyde, the vanilla of vanillin, the sweet aroma of toluene and ethyl benzene, the floral touches of 2-ethyl hexanol. These books were well aged, and it smelled like they'd been a good vintage to begin with.
Modern humans just didn't leave enough lignin in their paper; it never smelled right.
After breathing deeply for a bit, Glasses Twilight said, "Alright, I'm ready to talk."
Sunset nodded and said, "Ok."
"Why does everyone at a school I've never set foot in know my name?"
"A few weeks ago CHS had a visitor who was . . ." Sunset paused to think. She didn't need to lie for this part, and the best lies were the ones that diverged from the truth only when necessary, but she did need to phrase this well. "Well, let's just say she wasn't from around here."
Glasses Twilight raised an eyebrow and asked, "You had an undocumented immigrant at your school?"
Sunset gaped.
"The only reason you'd be cagey about where this person came from is if the knowledge become public could have a deleterious effect," Glasses Twilight said. Sunset was used to that kind of deduction being delivered in a threatening manner. Glasses Twilight had done nothing of the sort. It was purely analytical. There was no more menace than if Glasses Twilight were explaining how she'd come to realize that the logarithmic spiral is scale invariant.
"Yes," Sunset said. So very much, yes. "It wasn't just her presence in-country that was undocumented. On paper she didn't exist. She did, however, look just--"
"Like me," Glasses Twilight said. It was . . . it wasn't quite angry, but there was a hardness to her words. "You're telling me --expecting me to believe-- that someone who looked exactly like me just appeared out of the blue."
Sunset took a deep breath. This was where the lying came in. "Is it really so hard to believe that a newcomer to a city the size of Canterlot could find someone who looked like her?"
Princess Twilight didn't find anyone. She didn't look. It was sheer luck that no one at CHS had known this Twilight, and the only person who recognized that there were two Twilight in the city was the one person at school who'd immediately assume that it was a case of twin girls with twin dogs.
Glasses Twilight, of course, didn't know any of that. She just knew that Sunset claimed Princess Twilight had set out to find someone who looked like her. Reframing at it's best, Sunset hoped.
Glasses Twilight thought it over for a bit, then seemed to deflate. "I guess when you put it that way . . ." she said.
"You were begging the question?" Sunset asked.
Glasses Twilight's eyes lit up, and she asked, "You know what that actually means?" with a sort of awe.
Sunset smirked. Then she said, "Well, let's consider this conversation, or rather the meeting that precipitated it." She adopted a playfully overblown style for the question, "What are the odds that this happened by random chance? What. Are. The. Odds?"
After a suitably dramatic pause, she shifted into a conspiratorial mode of speech for the rest, "I'm just one person among so many in the city, this is just one day out of infinite, and this mall is but one place in the whole of Canterlot. The chances of you meeting me (of all people), today (of all days), and doing it here (of all places) are so very negligibly low that this can't be random."
Glasses Twilight snorted, Sunset continued, "Maybe it's destiny, maybe it's fate, maybe it's a conspiracy, but someone or something wanted this meeting to take place. It's the only reasonable explanation for how something so astronomically unlikely could have actually happened."
"You're not saying it was aliens," Glasses Twilight said.
"But it was aliens," Sunset said.
"And, of course, it all depends on assuming the end result was predetermined," Glasses Twilight said, "the odds of me meeting someone on some day in some place aren't low at all. It's only if we assume it had to be you, it had to be here, and it had to be now when it seems unlikely to be random."
Sunset nodded. This was going well. "Someone's got to win the lottery. Not every time, of course, but if enough people play . . ."
"And given the population of the planet," Glasses Twilight said, "if the odds of something happening to a random person on a random day are one in a million. . ."
"It happens seventy seven hundred times a day," Sunset said.
Glasses Twilight looked around. Sunset did too. There were no signs they'd be kicked out of the bookstore anytime soon.
After taking a deep breath then letting it out, Glasses Twilight said, "So someone came to your school, and --probably unsurprisingly-- there was someone in Canterlot she resembled, and I happened to be that person."
"Pretty much," Sunset said, "if you switched to contacts and let your hair down, you'd be one wardrobe change away from being indistinguishable."
"And she stole my identity," Glasses Twilight said with a touch of anger in her voice.
Sunset looked away. This was the hard part. Maybe it had seemed like getting Glasses Twilight to believe this was a case of mundane similarity would be the hard part --then again, maybe it hadn't; Sunset didn't remember-- but this was the real hard part. Princess Twilight had saved Sunset, and now Sunset was accusing her of a crime she didn't commit. Again, no less.
"This all started with you knowing my name," Glasses Twilight said. "Ergo, she took my name."
"Remember how I said it wasn't as bad as it seems?" Sunset asked.
"And because of that an entire school of people I've never met think they know me." The anger had grown significantly.
"She didn't mean any harm," Sunset said. "She was here for three days, two nights, and she wanted to blend in."
"By stealing my . . ." Glasses Twilight faltered. "My . . ." again she stopped.
"No one at CHS had ever met you," Sunset said.
Glasses Twilight near-shouted, "That's not--"
"She needed a place to stay," Sunset said.
"That's not the--" Glasses Twilight stopped. All of the anger disappeared in an instant.
Sunset pondered whether emotional whiplash were just an expression, or something Glasses Twilight might have to worry about.
"A place to stay?" Glasses Twilight asked with nothing but concern.
"She slept in the school library," Sunset said.
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