My Little Pony: Don’t Starve
By: TheBobulator
Chapter 1: Title Drop
A gentle ocean breeze flicked at Twilight’s mane. She groaned and stretched out on the grass, still keeping her eyes closed. Birds were chirping and the warmth of the sun made her so comfortable that she could sleep all day if she wanted to. Wasn’t I in the library a moment ago? She wondered to herself. In a single swift movement, she sat bolt upright and opened her eyes. “This isn’t the library.”
A tiny lizard-like creature appeared in front of the unicorn. “Astounding observation, my little bookworm. Would you like to tell us where we are as well?” Twilight narrowed her eyes. Upon closer inspection, it did closesly resemble the malignant troublemaking draconequus that she knew as... “Discord!”
“How’s my favorite element of harmony doing? Still turning hapless bystanders into stone?” Discord asked, spontaneously spawning a statue of himself, frozen in mid-dance. The statue disappeared and he replaced it with a stoneified Princess Luna standing next to an equally stone Princess Celestia.
With a bit of smug satisfaction, Twilight strode right up to Discord. “Those are some pretty big words coming from a small guy.” As intimidating as the god of chaos was, she found it really hard to take him seriously when was barely the same height as her foreleg.
The statues vanished at the same time as oversized bright red boxing gloves materialized on Discord’s hands. “Ha! Take that! And that!” He punched at Twilight’s leg, to little effect.
The purple unicorn ignored the silly chimera ineffectually swinging at her leg. She took this opportunity to examine her surroundings. The landscape appeared to be flat and sparse, save for a few random trees and shrubs dotted around haphazardly. However, off to her right, the water lapped at the grassland that just so happened to stop at a sudden dropoff into the depths of the unknown.
“Where is this, exactly? I don’t think an island with this kind of terrain existed anywhere near Equestria.” Twilight curiously mentioned to Discord, who was still punching her knee. “Once I think about it, there aren’t many islands near Equestria at all.”
Discord paused in the middle of a right hook and exchanged his red gloves for a hovering glass of orange juice. On closer inspection, it was a drinking glass with several whole oranges somehow shoved into it. “That’s because this is a place I’ve created all by myself. Isn’t it lovely?” He took a sip from the glass, depleting the amount of glass around the oranges as opposed to the more sensible removal of the oranges inside. Twilight tried not to think about it too hard, especially when the lord of chaos was involved. “I’ve got a better question for you: How did you get here? Did Celestia bring you here? I’ve been behaving myself, I swear!” Just for demonstration’s sake, a little halo appeared over his head.
Twilight clearly wasn’t satisfied with the answer. “I picked up a harmonica, and it spontaneously teleported me here.” She stomped the ground in front of Discord. “Put me back in my library, right now.”
The trickster nervously chuckled as his halo popped out of existence. “Oops. So that’s where I left the darn thing.”
“DISCOOOORD.” Twilight raised her voice, ears flattening against her head. “What. Did. You. Do.” Just in case, she charged her horn with magical energy.
“Uh...do you remember that one time when you and your friends were trying to turn me back into stone?” In order to jog Twilight’s memory, (not that it needed jogging anyway) Discord summoned little silly cardboard cutouts to demonstrate everything. “Specifically, the part where I hid the Elements of Harmony and stuff?” The happy little Discord cutout bounced its way around the Celestia cutout and picked up the little yellow treasure chest. The aforementioned chest burst open and promptly disappeared with the Discord cutout. “I may or may not have left a gift for you.”
The lavender librarian pony quickly put the pieces together. “So you left a harmonica at my place to bring me...here?”
“You should have seen this place before I renovated everything. I had a magnificent striped hill over there, a flying marshmallow stand right over here...” Discord continued to go on about his former absurd fantasy land. All evidence of head-height neon green turf and upside-down fountains were gone, only to be replaced with the boring landscape Twilight observed around her.
While Discord went on about how glorious his spinning chocolate windmills, Twilight had had enough of his antics. “I’m just going to teleport out of here.” With practiced ease, she brought up the specifics of the teleportation spell and prepared it. “I’ll leave you alone with... whatever this is.” She focused on the mental image of her nice comfortable library nestled inside her tree.
From the trickster’s point of view, the lavender pony disappeared in a flash of similarly colored sparkles and reappeared a short distance away. She looked around in confusion for a few moments before trying it again. Discord happily settled into a spontaneously appearing sofa and munched on a box of popcorn as he watched Twilight hopelessly teleport to various places around his general location. “If I may,” He interjected, stopping her before she could charge another teleport spell. “I’d like to point out that I magic-proofed this entire dimension. It’s also candy-proofed, plaid-proofed, and Pinkie-proofed as well, just because I could. Isn’t it wonderful?”
“Can’t you take it down?”
“Nope.”
“Why?”
“I forgot how I put it up in the first place because, you know, somepony that didn’t really appreciate humor at all turned me into stone a very long time ago.”
“You can’t forget! You’re lying.” Twilight narrowed her eyes.
Discord casually shrugged. “I’m lazy.”
Twilight snorted in annoyance. “Give me a step by step of how you did it, and maybe I can figure out how you put it together. Using that information, I can theoretically take it down.”
The sofa morphed into a rocking chair. “Nope. Too lazy.”
“What?!? Then what do you expect me to do here?” Twilight was getting more agitated by Discord’s continued antics. Not only was he being uncooperative, but she couldn’t escape the dimension she was now trapped in. “There’s nothing here besides trees, rocks, and bushes.” She mentally included the grass and flowers that equally dotted the landscape.
Discord willed the couch and popcorn to disappear. “Well, I suggest that you dig around in that cavernous mind of yours and get those survival skills in order.” He put on some massively oversized silly sunglasses and donned his water wings. “I’ll go do something about this whole mess soon. Don’t worry though- Princess Celestia made me create a functional ecosystem and blah-de blah responsibility blah boring stuff basically you’ll be fine.” An innertube appeared around his approximation of a waist and he promptly jumped into the water. “And one word of advice!”
“What’s that?” Twilight dejectedly replied, looking around at the land that would possibly be her new home for the foreseeable future.
Discord cheerfully called out two simple, obvious words before disappearing under the waves. “Don’t Starve!”