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// Practically impractical 
// Story: Destination: Thataway! 
// by Hawattie 
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	I did not have to travel very far from the room with the invisible archers on my own. After clearing just three zombie infested rooms I stumbled into a room absolutely filled with random junk. Doorknobs, tea kettles, playing cards, whirring gizmos, doohickeys, thingamabobs, and myriad other things I didn't have names for lay scattered in heaps around the place. Most of the objects showed signs of great age, as if they'd been gathering dust for hundreds of years, but here and there were objects that had held up regardless. Directly across from the spot I entered from was a door which helpfully had a sign taped to it which read, "boss room; wait for entire party to be ready before opening".
A cursory glance at the perimeter of the room revealed no less than three arbitrary hallways and two more doors that my companions would no doubt come down sooner or later. Satisfied that I was exactly where I needed to be, I sat down next to one of the piles of junk and started rooting through it.
"I'm relieved to see you can follow basic instructions," Ner said suddenly from right behind me. I nearly dropped the rubber garden hose I was inspecting in surprise at the sound of his voice so close to me. I spun around to reveal the necromancer himself to be sitting calmly on one of the piles of junk, not just talking to me as a disembodied voice like he'd done so far in the fortress. "I half expected you to trundle on into the boss room without your backup."
Over the initial surprise, I went back to pulling things out of my pile. I'd already accrued a small heap of random items of my own. "I may be an idiot," I explained, "but I'm not stupid. You said yourself that you wanted to challenge me enough to make it difficult to reach you to make our showdown more interesting, but not so much that I'd just die outright. Whatever's lurking behind that door is something I'm going to need my friends to beat." Something shiny near the bottom of one of the other piles caught my eye. I went over and started digging it out.
Ner'Ghalad seemed to be at a loss for words for a moment. He shook away his shock with a slight shake of his head before replying. "I feel I must apologize to you," he said. "I'm afraid I may have misjudged your intelligence." I raised an eyebrow, but Ner couldn't see it since I was half-buried in the pile of junk with only my hind legs and tail sticking out trying to get the shiny out.
I paused my wiggling and digging only long enough to grunt out an "apology accepted" before getting right back into it. I nearly had a good enough grip on the shiny thing to get it out.
A faint sound, like that of a body sliding off of a pile of junk and a hoof being held politely to an ear, reached me. It was an oddly specific faint sound. "Pardon? I didn't quite catch that," Ner's muffled voice said. I probably wouldn't have been able to hear him if my hearing hadn't been enhanced way back in the sorceress's tower.
With one mighty yank and a ferocious yell which would've put any barbarian to shame I pulled the shiny object free from its prison. Now that it was fully revealed, the shiny object turned out to be some sort of brass tube with one end closed off and a couple small valves and dials along the side. I victoriously spat my prize on top of my small pile of swag before turning to Ner. He was still in the pose the noise he'd made earlier suggested, leaning slightly towards the pile I'd been in with one hoof cupped around an ear, but his eyes were fixed upon the tube I'd pulled out. "I said 'apology accepted'." 
Ner continued to look at the brass tube as if he hadn't heard me. "What's a thaumic splicer doing down here?" he muttered before he realized I was still there. "Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to ignore you like that. I was simply surprised to see you pull a thaumic splicer out of that pile. There's no telling what I have stored down here, it seems." 
"What's a thaumic splicer?" I asked. "I just pulled it out because it's shiny. Also, where'd all this stuff come from? Most of it seems to be junk, but there's a few cool things here and there." I resumed searching through the nearby piles.
Ner sat next to my small pile of loot and sifted through it as he talked. "A thaumic splicer is a device that combines two or more magical inputs into a single cohesive magical signal, useful for consolidating multiple unwieldy mana streams into a single, manageable flow. Invented not long before my banishment, it made the castings of complex spells, teleportation for instance, manageable by the average unicorn. A marvel of unicorn engineering, though no doubt made obsolete in the thousand or so years I've been gone. As for this place," he flourished grandly at the piles of junk surrounding us. "This is where I store the belongings of the ponies whose towns I raided and destroyed during my rise to power. It seemed like a waste to simply burn potentially valuable goods, so I always had a group of minions thoroughly loot a newly conquered town before they razed it to the ground. I've had a few new additions since my return, but nothing from Equestria, only its neighbors. It wouldn't do to have that nag Celestia breathing down my neck before I'm ready."
I elected not to mention how the sorceress was probably one of the ponies who had made the thaumic splicer obsolete or how she had some magical devices in her tower that would probably exceed the necromancer's wildest dreams. He already had control of the sorceress herself, If he didn't know about the scientific treasure trove locked in her tower or the magical knowledge held within her mind I wasn't going to tell him about it. Ner was powerful enough as is without adding a thousand years of magical and scientific advancements to the table. "What's your deal with Celestia?" I asked instead. "There's gotta be some reason you decided to go against her."
"You're right," Ner said bitterly, "there is a reason." He trailed off and sort of just glared at a spot off to his left.
I joined him in sitting next to my pile of stuff. By then it was almost half as big as any of the other piles and just as varied. I idly picked up a couple of the objects, an old wooden butter churner and a tightly coiled spring, and tried to find a way to put them together. "I'm listening if you want to talk," I prompted. The spring found a home in one of the cracks in the churner's wooden side. I grabbed the next item, a cast iron pot, and continued putting them together.
Ner heaved a great sigh burdened with the anguish of heavy loss and sorrow and glanced at my tinkering before returning to his pensive brooding. I almost thought he wasn't going to tell me what was on his mind. "Are you familiar with the term 'discord's advocate'?" he asked at length.
"Not particularly," I admitted. My sculpture/contraption/thing made of Ner's random junk was steadily coming together, I had found some black tar-like stuff that really helped glue things together. "Enlighten me."
"Upon my return I stumbled upon a reference book filled with similar sayings and this one was particularly intriguing to me. It's also sometimes called 'devil's advocate,'" Ner explained, "a discord's advocate is someone who, when faced with an argument will argue the side alternative to the accepted norm for the sake of the argument despite not necessarily agreeing with this stance. By taking this position, the discord's advocate can craft an argument which will reveal the qualities and weaknesses of the popular side's argument and use that information to either improve or abandon the original position.
I found a slot that looked like it would fit the thaumic splicer, and motioned for Ner to continue as I worked it into place. "Like all sayings, this one has an origin. Several thousand years ago, Discord himself ruled over the world with an iron fist of chaos. It was only by the brave actions of two young alicorns that the chaos tyrant's reign was ended, but his influence did not simply vanish when Discord was imprisoned. Discord planted the seeds of chaos, both literal and metaphorical, that would continue to wreak havoc long after he was gone. Now you see, this is where the explanation offered by the modern reference book and what actually happened differ.
"According to the modern-day reference book, the saying originated from a post-discord era cult called the 'Advocates of Discord' bent upon returning the world to chaos in the hopes of freeing Discord from his prison. In actuality there was no cult, it was just one pony, and his motives were markedly different. Instead of bringing about Discord's return, some of the last of the chaos lord's magic cursed the pony so that he was compelled to go against the norm, to take the unpopular side of an argument."
I was nearly done attaching everything I'd grabbed to my construction. "So you're saying you fought against Celestia unwillingly?" I inferred.
"At first," Ner said. "But Discord's mind magic is a tricky thing. Once it gets a good strong hold of you, which doesn't take more than a couple of days, it's nearly impossible to reverse and even more difficult to resist. It's easier to simply accept its changes. But fighting the hero who freed the populace from Discord's tyranny wasn't enough. I had to do everything in the most unorthodox way I could! I learned necromancy, a most unpopular school of magic, I practiced with the crossbow, a weapon considered too 'brutish' for the civilized unicorn populace. The list goes on."
I picked up the last object I'd grabbed, a bit of scrap metal that had a big red button on one side and a couple loose wires on the other, and looked for a place to put it. "I imagine how you're a bad guy who's all buddy-buddy with the hero can be attributed to that," I remarked.
Ner nodded. "Eventually Discord's magic wore off, but by then I was too far gone to change my ways. It had molded me into the stallion you see before you today and there was nothing anypony could do about it."
"Well I suppose it's a good thing that Discord's curse wore off before it made you do everything wrong just to be contrarian. It would suck to not be able to, say, eat solid foods because the average pony is able to chew." I spotted the perfect spot for my big red button and grinned widely as I affixed it in place. On a whim I wrapped the loose wires around a couple metal spurs sticking out of a toaster oven. I took a step back to admire my work. 
"Quite," Ner agreed succinctly. He got up from his spot to join me in admiring my... thing. It looked a bit like one of the piles of junk decided it wanted to try being a tree, but didn't have faintest clue what a tree was supposed to look like. Dozens of objects were haphazardly hanging from random positions of the main frame of the structure. After several minutes of silently observing the thing Ner asked, "What is it supposed to be?" 
"I haven't the foggiest," I replied. "Isn't it great though?" I flicked a small propeller sticking out of the top and it spun with a small whizzing sound.
Ner looked like he was about to respond, but a small buzz from something inside his cloak sounded before he could. He pulled a small hoof mirror that showed my friends walking down a hallway out of his pocket. "Your companions are almost here," he said, pocketing the mirror. And without another word Ner vanished in a puff of magic.
True to what Ner had said, my ears perked and I heard the sound of my friends' steps coming from down one of the hallways.
"...just saying that we should have found him by now," I heard Fphant saying. "What if he got himself killed?"
"Ah, he'll be fine," the Courier said. "He's a tough little guy, and I'm sure he's not stupid enough to wander into something he couldn't handle." The man's confidence in me brought a smile to my face.
The three of them walked into view then, and I waved and called out to them. "Hey guys!"
The Courier shot Fphant a look that said, "I told you so," but the mirage didn't notice it. I'm pretty sure I saw a look of relief on Fphant's features, but I can never really tell what his expressions are. "There you are-" Fphant started to say, but then he caught sight of my construction. "What the buck is that?"
"Oh nothing," I said dismissively. "I got bored while waiting for you guys and decided to make something is all."
"Anyways," the Courier looked around at the different hallways and doors around the room. "Where do we go from here?"
"Oh, that's easy," I said, pointing to the boss room's door. The note that was taped to it earlier was conspicuously absent. "The way forward is thataway."