//------------------------------//
// The Chapter in Which a Man Questions his Sanity 
// Story: The Cuddlequest of Earth: Unintended Consequences 
// by Tyrannosaurus_Tux 
//------------------------------//

It was early morning in the sleepy town of Lone Jack, Missouri. 

Leonard sat at an outside table at a cafe, steaming hot mug of coffee at his resting hands. He looked into the swirling mix of cream and roasted bean grinds. He dipped a simple aluminum spoon into the drink and swirled around the coffee around some more. The table was plain, another seat sat empty opposite of him, and the cafe was otherwise filled with chatting, content people. And ponies.

Don't forget the ponies.

It had been a year (or three) since that eventful day that the Cuddle Crusade had rolled through his sleepy town and hugged the ever loving—erm, hate out of everyone there, including Leonard. All who had this experience by the ponies relate the feeling of having new magic in their bodies as having hot chocolate running through their veins. Leonard sipped his coffee. He would rather have hot coffee flow through his veins. Don't get him wrong, this was still a pleasant experience, but a man needs his coffee. He stole a look up and sighed. Even the sky seemed different today. 

He took another sip of coffee and checked his phone. Withdrawing the device from his pocket, he keyed in the passwords and checked his notifications. "YOUR BASE IS UNDER ATTACK!" Dismissed. "YOUR CROPS HAVE FULLY GROWN!" Dismissed. "YOUR DINOSAURS ARE RAWRING FOR A FIGHT!" Dismissed. Leonard blinked. He didn't play games on his phone. Who was playing games on his phone? After dismissing a few more, such as "YOUR DOGGO NEEDS SOMEONE TO PLAY WITH!" and "MEET PONY SINGLES TODAY!" The last of which caused Leonard to rub his eyes. Finally, he came to the actual news articles.

"Nintendo announces Nintendo Switch! A game console that is also magical, and supports temporary transfigurations!" Leonard stared blankly at this announcement and expanded the news article. As he read through the text, his gaze hardened and his coffee cooled. 


Not only can you play your favorite Nintendo games throughout the years, you can also with the press of a button learn what it is like to be something else for a day! Nintendo announced this at E3 2015 to a confused crowd until the device was demonstrated, when Hiroshi Yamauchi himself turned into a pegasus pony! Many wing hugs were there to be had with his lovely assistants! The limits of the device are that the transfigurations only last for an hour, and permanent transfiguration is not a planned feature. Because that's illegal. And wrong. In other news...



Leonard nodded at the news report, reconfirming in his mind something that he already suspected. The Japanese are weird. Taking a longer sip of his coffee, he thumbed away the report of the Nintendo Switch in order to see other news stories. He looked and saw an article about the Presidents of Isreal and Iran hugging each other. Thumbing that uncomfortable image of two old guys hugging it out away, Leonard saw another news article about... what was this?



In Scotland, the dream is finally coming true. With her book money, JK Rowling is formally opening the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. This comes after a startling discovery that the magic of cuddling that was brought over from Equestria has caused humans to also exhibit magical abilities. The school will be headed by one Twilight Sparkle and will focus on the research, application, and the teaching of human magic. Already, humans have begun to levitate objects, while giggling madly. They also guffaw as they throw fire bolts, lightning bolts, ice bolts, and many other kinds of bolts. This discovery has also launched an entirely new scientific field to be found, and it will be centered around the new school of magic. Many people, donning their new wizard robes, along with Rowling, are quoted to have been saying, "This is the best day of my life!" Read more...



'Well,' thought Leonard. 'That's a thing.' Taking another sip of his coffee, Leonard relished the sensations of warm drink that woke him up. Setting his mug back down, his sight fell to the spoon that sat next to his other dishware. bits of coffee stuck to it, and as Leonard gazed, it began to twitch. Concentrating, he could just... about... 

"Heya, Leonard!" shouted a new voice to the cafe. The noise of the newcomer caused Leonard to jump in his chair, and the spoon flipped before clicking back down on the wooden surface. Leonard turned to the source of the shout and saw the inevitable pink. Rather, it was Pinkie Pie who had elected to suddenly pay a visit. 

He took a breath through his nose, then out his mouth, and said, "Hello, Pinkie." 

Pinkie's response came in the form of leaning up, exposing her pink, round belly and tiny bellybutton, and wrapping her candy-cane smelling forelegs around Leonard's torso. Of course, he reciprocated, wrapping his own jacketed arms around the pink pony. Her candy-cane style mane smelled of candy cane. Go figure.

Leaning back, Pinkie asked with a grin, "Were you practicing magic? Were ya? Huh? Huh? Huh?" Leonard scratched the back of his head and looked at the spoon he had inadvertently flung. 

"Yeah, I guess I was," he replied.

Pinkie Pie leaned up again to let her forehooves hang from her torso as she bounced from hind leg to hind leg as she bubbly said, "Oooh! I don't often visit Earth anymore, but when I do, you humans keep surprising me!" 

Nodding, Leonard cast his eyes skyward again, and then back to Pinkie Pie. "Hey, Pinkie..." he asked. "...do you... think there are unintentional side effects of this whole Cuddle Crusade thing that we may have ignored or overlooked so far?" Sitting back on her rear, Pinkie put her left hoof to her muzzle and began to ponder. The display was complete with her tapping her chin and saying, "Think, think, think."

Finally, a physical lightbulb went off above Pinkie Pie's head and she turned to Leonard with pursed lips, asking, "Is it the magic that you guys are experiencing?" Leonard, having finished his coffee, sat his cup down and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. He looked skyward again, and then back to Pinkie. 

"No," he said. "That was probably an inevitable outcome, given that you guys infused us non-magical creatures with magic, probably to turn us into innately magical creatures for the rest of time."

Pinkie, after another thinking session, asked, "Is there a psykologikal effect that you guys are experiencing, then?" 

Scratching his head, Leonard "hmmed" himself. "No..." he then replied. "I don't think there are any bad things that are happening here. All the cuddle magic is doing is good, from what I can see."

Finally, Pinkie asked, "Then what are you talking about, Lenny?" Leonard finally got up from his simple wooden seat, extended his arm skyward, and pointed at the glowing swirling mass of purple-ish magic hanging overhead with an open palm. Leonard declared, 

"What I'm worried about, Pinkie Pie is that there's a hole in the sky!"

Sure enough, the magical anomaly did indeed look like someone had taken some careless actions in handling the fabric of spacetime in the air above the town, Discord, and roughly torn it like a scrape, or perhaps a tearing wound. The scab-shaped hole in the sky occasionally had bright violet lightning bolts of magic slowly arc their way across the edges of the portal. All-in-all, it was a real eyesore. 

The tear in the fabric of reality was present since the beginning of the Crusade when a certain somebody facilitated the Crusade's entrance to Earth. Since then, the hole in the sky has been swirling and generally making the people of Lone Jack nervous. 

Looking up, Pinkie Pie also regarded the magical construct. "Oh," she simply said. "That thing." 

Leonard clasped both his hands on the back of his neck and started turning in circles, with his gaze cast downwards. "It's just that..." he began. "Doesn't that look dangerous?" 

Pinkie looked again, and she tapped her chin again with a "hmm." Then she scratched her cutie mark, and remarked, "Yeah, it kinda does look spooky, now that I think about it." 

"Right?" insisted Leonard. "You have your Dimensional Transit Stations, where humans, ponies, dragons, whatever can freely travel between the worlds now, so... what's this still doing here?"

Looking up at the swirling scab of magic again, Pinkie said, "Yeah, you're right! We don't need this spooky looking thing anymore!" Withdrawing a kazoo from... somewhere, she blew a few notes into it. Then, Leonard opened his mouth to ask what she intended to do with that kazoo when a flash of light interrupted him. Something had just teleported in the air above the two. 

It was a hideous amalgamation of many animals and creatures. It had the head of a goat, with two jagged horns from a deer and some sort of blue goat. The body was snakelike but resembled a brown mammal, with a tan lion's paw and an eagle claw for the forearms. The hind legs were that of a giraffe and a dragon. It floated in the air but flapped it's pegasus wing and its bat wing all the same. The posture was that of a recline, and the thing regarded the two with a smug grin with a single fan growing out of the lower jaw. This was a Draconnequis, and it is your enemy his name was Discord, the spirit of disharmony of chaos. Reformed. 

"You called, Pinkie?" asked Discord. He oriented his floating body to appear prone, with his hands under his snout. 

Pinkie pointed past Pinkie Pie to the sky-hole and responded, "Yeah. There's a big, weird sky thingy that we don't need anymore. do you think you can get rid of it?"

Following her hoof, Discord saw the great big magical anomaly in the sky, and mouthed "Oh." Then, his grin grew wide, and he threw his arms out, and they stretched like putty before snapping back like rubber. Discord then exclaimed, "What's the matter with it? Too chaotic?"

Pinkie looked critically in the hole in the sky, with an ankle under her chin. She "Hmm"-ed, and finally said with a smile, "Naw, I just don't like the color. That, and it makes humans nervous." At this, Discord finally turned his attention to Leonard, who, by that point, had taken the time to apply hand sanitizer and was rubbing his hands. 

"I don't know, man," said Leonard. "It doesn't look all that safe." At this, Discord looked back up to the quivering mess of magic and could even see the faint auroras in the sky, faintly shimmering with foreign magic as it assimilated itself to this world. 

Finally, Discord said, "No, I suppose not. After all, it is an uncontrolled rip in the fabric of reality, and we've made more stable portals to Equestria. In fact, I'm surprised more baddies haven't fallen out of it."

At this, another cafe patron, the ever-dead, and the never-rotting Zaal'gor raised his horned visage over his newspaper. If the skeletal overlord had eyebrows, one would be raised. At it is. the dreaded gaze of the dead-but-not-really-dead was simply leveled at Discord. Leonard didn't see that the skeleton took exception to this, and was just watching the magical event horizon with a small grimace. 

Seeing this, Discord chuckled light-heartedly. "Oh, don't be silly," he said. "You humans are altogether too serious for my tastes while being silly," He stroked his beard, and continued, "Actually, this self-contradictory chaos is what I like about you humans. You all are possibly the most complicated creatures I have ever met, and I've met me!"

A second Discord appeared in a puff of purple smoke to nod whole-heartedly. After that, the second Discord vanished again. Then, Discord said, "Very well. If it will make you happy." Another flash of white light and Discord was dressed as a nanny, with lipstick, old person's hat, old person's shirt and all. He took out an oversized needle, some oversized biohazard blue thread, and flew up to the sky fissure. Poking the edges of the hole, Discord set to work... stitching the thing up. He flew across the thing several times in the work, and his actual stitching pattern was incoherent and messy. Finally, he pulled hard on the needle, and the stitches closed up the sky-wound. Taking the time to tie off the other end of the chaos-stitch, Discord took out an oversized pair of two-handed scissors and snipped off the excess string. 

Flying down to the cafe again, Discord said in an old-lady way, "Let me know if that heals up nicely, and we can take out the stitches, dear." Spinning in place midair, Discord discarded his attire and makeup and laughed. Then, he looked directly at you and ended with, "But for now, stay chaotic, my friends! Arrivederci!"

By then, Leonard and Pinkie were having more coffee. Well, Leonard had coffee. Pinkie had something not-at-all caffeinated. Wouldn't want to turn Lone Jack or any other city to turn into a second, pink, magical Chernobyl, now would we? Discord ignored that he wasn't being paid attention to, but instead snapped his paw fingers. In a flash of white light, Discord vanished again. Presumably, to ruin some other poor fellow's day, I guess. 

Then, Pinkie Pie asked Leonard, "Is that better, Leonard? Does that make you feel better?" Nodding Leonard had another sip of his coffee.

'Not really,' he thought. 'There's a stitched-up hole in the sky that could potentially still spit out horrible nasties.' He added cream and sipped again. 'At least the coffee is good.'