The beginning of a long, illustrious career in pulling stupid stunts · 8:31am Jan 2nd, 2015
Scene from next chapter of Last Draconequus for y'all, just to prove the story is not dead:
Very quickly he remembered why he didn’t usually eat breakfast before going on his adventures. After gorging himself on cheesy popcorn, he found he had much less stamina than usual; he acquired a stitch in his side after only a few minutes of vigorous trotting. This wouldn’t do at all.
Discord went to the stream that ran near his cave and began walking through it, hopping from rock to rock, splashing into the stream and letting the cool water run over his feet to invigorate himself. He was slower this way, but slower was better with the muscle cramps in his side; the important thing was to go slower in a way that wouldn’t bore him, because if he just tried going slower on the path, he’d get bored and try to speed up.
Soon he reached where the stream ran into the river, which gave him a great idea. A few minutes trotting by the banks of the river brought him to the large fallen oak he remembered from his last trip to the river; the tree had toppled into the river some time ago, and the top half of it, where there had been branches, was mostly worn away, but the bottom half was still a fairly firm tree trunk. Discord focused his magic on it, telling parts of the wood to rot and turn goopy, then to liquify and run off, until he had carved away a section of tree trunk about the length of his body and hollowed it out. More magic forced the ends to grow together and bend up, until the tree trunk was an impromptu, lumpy, uneven canoe. Discord pushed the canoe out into the river, first walking and then swimming behind it, until it had enough clearance that he could pull himself into it.
The first two times he tried, he capsized the canoe, flipping it over with himself underneath. This was annoying as heck. Discord could breathe under water, but every time he changed from water to air or vice versa, there was a moment of gasping panic as his body tried to shift from one type of oxygenation organ to another, and going from one to the other always made him feel like there was something around his neck choking him in the moments before his gills opened up or closed off. He didn’t want to simply stay underwater, though, because the current was fast and unpredictable in places, and he could easily get caught and smashed into a rock. If he was in a canoe, his canoe would smash into the rock, not him, and his distance vision was a lot better above water, so he’d have better luck seeing the rock in time and paddling away from it. The third time, he got in by throwing one arm and his tail over the side of the canoe first and then kicking with the arm and leg that were still underwater, until the canoe flipped, and he beat his wings and twisted his body just enough to fall into the canoe instead of being pulled over the side into the water again.
The canoe was just wide enough that if Discord held onto its sides in the front, with his arms, he could dangle his legs off either side of the canoe into the water and kick, and this was how he paddled. Occasionally when he had a current to fight he would let his tail fall into the water on one side of the canoe or the other, and use it to provide extra power.
This lasted until his canoe got caught by the rapids, at which point Discord needed to keep all his limbs inside the canoe and braced against it just to make sure he wasn’t thrown out of it. The canoe was flung through the water at high speed, smashing against rocks hard enough to punch holes in it, then spinning off again through the rushing water. Discord frantically focused his magic on the canoe, making the holes seal over, which didn’t prevent him from being thoroughly soaked with cold river water or keep the water level inside the canoe from rising every time it happened. Sometimes as they approached an underwater rock Discord would flap his wings frantically, lifting the canoe just enough to clear the rock, and this kept him from losing the entire bottom of his canoe at once, but mostly he was unable to do anything except ride it out as the rapids bounced his canoe off rock after rock, lifted him up and down, and spun him with great force. Discord’s heart beat wildly with a mixture of exhilaration and terror, and his paws clung to the canoe so tightly the knuckles under the fur of his lion paw had gone white.
And then he saw the waterfall up ahead.
“Oh poop--“
He barely had time to scream before what felt like a wall of water slammed down on him. Even with gills open Discord wasn’t going to be able to breathe in this, and what he’d seen before going over the edge and being sucked under the water was that the ground was very very very very far below him. For a few moments he thrashed, trying uselessly to swim to the edge of the falling mass of water, before it struck him how little that was going to help him. He was falling, and if the water driving him down with its weight didn’t crush him when he hit the ground, gravity itself would.
Up is down, up is down, up is down! It was several seconds before the magic clicked; falling to his death wasn’t good for his concentration. Then the world inverted, and Discord, his canoe, and some quantity of the water from the waterfall arced in the opposite direction, falling away from the waterfall. As they burst out of the mass of water, Discord could see again. Above him, the ground, green grass and gray rocks and silver water up above his head. Below him, endless, bottomless blue sky, and he was falling down into it, falling forever.
Discord screamed, and screamed, thrashing his limbs and beating his sopping wet wings in too uncoordinated and chaotic a fashion to get any lift at all, as he fell into the infinite well of the sky. Okay, okay, go back, down is down, let down be down!
This time the water and the canoe did not come with him; they continued to fall upward into the sky. Only Discord himself started falling back to the ground again. The world spun around him, sky returning to up, land returning to down, and now his plunge was decidedly not bottomless. There was a very visible and very finite end to it, rushing toward him.
For just a few moments, he decided that down was sideways. This was somehow even worse than the bottomless sky; as he fell perpendicular to ground and sky, he realized that he was plunging toward the horizon, a thin line where sky and earth met, and it seemed to him that the narrow meeting of the two must mean that if he were to fall into it, it would squash him, turn him into a line as narrow as the horizon itself. No. He made down up again, fell enough into the sky to gain altitude, and then reversed it, high enough from the ground that by now, after multiple reversals and a commensurate lessening of his panic, he could actually get his wings under control. They were small, and asymmetrical, and he wasn’t a strong flier, so all his frantic wingbeats were doing were slowing his descent and allowing him to change his direction to “forward and down” rather than straight down, but that was enough. Discord aimed himself at a cloud, and plowed into it, sliding across its puffy soft surface fast and hard enough that he’d have fallen off the edge if he hadn’t been digging in with claws and tail and hoof, as hard as he could, while he slid.
He came to a stop with his head hanging off the edge of the cloud, but enough of the rest of his body on it that he was able to safely sit up, and then fall backward against the cloud, lying on it. For a few moments he panted. And then he began to laugh.
“That was awesome! I gotta tell Little Sister about this! That was like the best stunt ever!”
Discord can breath underwater... Head cannon accepted!
Still some edits to be made, but it's great to see that this story is still going. Thanks for sharing.
(I for one wouldn't use "This was annoying as heck" for discord's character. It seems too mature for him and isn't a phrase usually used in third person storytelling.)