Over the past several weeks, Sonata had learned to expect the unexpected from Mr. Discord. Some days, he was the model of professionalism. Others, he was like a child on Yuletide morning. Every day was an adventure, or so he insisted whenever her headache got really bad. The morning after he called in his time off, she poked her head into the kitchen of his—and now her—humble home. There was the fridge, the oven, the cabinets extending up to and along the ceiling... "Good morning?"
"Good morning!" Sonata turned to face the sound. Mr. Discord stood on the wall in a corner of the kitchen Sonata hadn't looked at yet, clad in a hot pink bathrobe and hunched predatorily over the waffle iron. "I do hope you're hungry, Sonata. Road trips always give me an appetite, and it seems best to prepare for that ahead of time."
"I guess I'm hungry." An unfamiliar bit of shame prodded Sonata in the back of her mind. "I, uh, can make coffee?"
"Sonata, your coffee has many applications, but ingesting it is not one of them. I assure you, the Prench press is already taking care of it." Mr. Discord craned his neck to the opposite end of the kitchen. "Non, Jean-Phillipe?"
"Quite so," said the coffee maker in an unmistakably Bittish accent.
"Just make yourself comfortable, my dear. I know it's usually toast and cereal around here, but I haven't gotten a chance to play doting father figure since Luna ran away from home during her little punk rock phase." Mr. Discord chuckled. "So glad I still have those photos."
Sonata sat at the table, which still rested on the floor. The meal did technically involve waffles somewhere beneath the mountains of fruit and whipped cream. She picked at hers while Mr. Discord proceeded to eat his with enough enthusiasm to expand his goatee to a full beard with everything clinging to his chin.
As he scraped the leavings back on his plate, he frowned and said, "Are you sure you're alright? I've seen you eat a raw pork belly and ask for seconds."
Sonata squirmed. "It's just... I know this is the fastest way to make me feel better, but... this is Aria. She's the worst. And she thinks I'm the worst."
"She's also in prison, and would likely appreciate your help getting her out of it."
"Maybe." Sonata slumped in her seat, even her ear fins drooping. "Or maybe she'll just punch me for not going away."
A hand patted her shoulder. Sonata looked up to see Mr. Discord smiling down at her. "Trust me, Sonata. Siblings may squabble, but you can count on them when the rest of the world is trying to get in the way of your rivalry."
She turned away and huffed, "We're not even from the same clutch."
"When did that ever matter?"
Sonata felt her guts twist as the truth struck home. "It didn't. Not once we were stuck here." She shoved her plate away and turned back to Mr. Discord as she said, "How are we getting to Bloodstone?"
He just gave her a funny look and summoned his car keys to his hand.
Sonata looked back and forth between keys and man, waiting for one of them to do something interesting. Finally, she said, "So we're just taking your car?"
Mr. Discord gave her a look she'd seen mostly on Adagio, one that told her just how stupid she was being without ever explaining why. "Yes. We are. Was there some part of 'road trip' you didn't understand?" His expression softened to one Sonata had never seen on Adagio, genuine concern. "Seriously, I'm never sure which parts of human culture you've absorbed."
She shrugged. "I guess I just wasn't expecting something so... straightforward."
"Tell me, Sonata, are you at all familiar with my Equestrian analogue?"
She shivered. "You mean the one we call Reiipivzheerv."
"Gesundheit." Mr. Discord passed her a tissue. "What does that translate to, if I may ask?"
Sonata wrung the tissue in her hands as the legends echoed in her memory. "Song shredder."
"How poetic. So, assuming we, say, teleport to Aria and inform her that nice Mister..." After a moment's pause, Discord opened his mouth and let Sonata's voice emanate from it for one word. "Reiipivzheerv wants to tear her apart into subatomic particles, shove her through a nanoscale wormhole, and paste her back together on the other end, how do you think she'd react?"
"Probably go for your shins, then your stomach, then your eyes. She really likes going for the eyes."
"Duly noted. As I hope you've gathered, just because you've grown comfortable around the local avatar of chaos doesn't mean the rest of your old trio will be so sanguine."
Sonata shook her head. "No, they're both fine with blood."
Mr. Discord smirked. "I can never tell when you're doing that on purpose. Besides, in my experience, the journey is at least as important as the destination. It may give you time to reflect on these new feelings of yours, help you adjust to them. Feel free to use me as a sounding board along the way."
"... and then Aria said 'No, I'm not going to eat it, I'm trying to stuff it back in him,' and Adagio said, 'They don't work that way, moron, he's good as dead,' and I said, 'So can I eat it?' and Aria said..."
Mr. Discord took the brief reprieve to glance at the clock on the dashboard. Then he expanded his mind to look for temporal anomalies. He found none. And yet, somehow, only five minutes had passed since they'd set out. Five minutes of a strange blend of inane chatter and casual grotesquerie that, after long exposure to Sonata Dusk, actually managed to be more boring than typical small talk.
The blessed silence ended all too soon. "Well, I'm not one hundred percent sure about the translation from Seatongue, but it definitely wasn't nice. So I called her something worse, and then Adagio pinched both our ears, and that was when we remembered that we were supposed to be nurses, but fortunately it was the Civil War so no one really expected to come out of the field hospital with all their limbs anyway. But that was only the third worst thing Aria's ever called me. The second worst one was..."
The stoplight ahead turned red. Mr. Discord felt his eye twitch. He projected his rage at the fabric of the world and punched a hole in the fabric of space and time with his mind. He drove through the resulting portal, daring any vehicles to be in his way on the other side. Unsurprisingly, no one took him up on the challenge. "Would you look at that!" he said with forced cheer. "We're here!"
"We are? Wow, that was fast!" Sonata looked around to see what had changed since the last time she'd been in Bloodstone.
The answer seemed to be "not much." The town was definitely different from Canterlot. As Adagio had said once, Canterlot was a suburb of Crystal City, but Bloodstone was runoff. Common aesthetic themes included bare concrete, barbed wire, and elaborate graffiti. There was the occasional spot of some class—an intact house from the early parts of the last century, an elaborate block-wide mural, a place named Flamecano Hibachi Grill that was home to several good memories—but for the most part, the entire town managed to fit itself along the wrong side of the tracks.
Mr. Discord drove past a diner. Sonata watched it go and felt a twinge in her heart.
I'm tired of fast food. I need a meal.
She shook herself. "It's not even the same diner."
"The same diner as what?"
"The one we were feeding from when the spiraling rainbows showed up." Sonata sighed. "We spent months waiting for Adagio to figure out just where it was. Boring, hungry months."
"Well, perhaps that will give you and Aria something to bond over. We're here."
"Here" turned out to be a hulking, squat brick of a building that might have been white at some point about forty years ago.
Sonata read the sign aloud. "Bloodstone Women's Correctional Facility."
"Indeed, though I've heard they let women from out of town use it as well." Mr. Discord looked around. "Now, where can I park around here?"
Sonata stared at him. "It's Bloodstone. You don't park a car this nice unless you want it to belong to three scrap dealers and a tire store."
Mr. Discord raised an eyebrow. "We are right next to a prison."
"Yeah, so all of the attention will be on the people already inside of it."
"I take it you've been here before."
Sonata nodded. "Adagio liked places where no one asked a lot of questions. Aria liked places where people gave her excuses to fight."
"And you?"
She shrugged. "The restaurants are neutral ground. Some things are sacred."
Mr. Discord snorted. "Personally, I find sacred cows make the tastiest hamburgers, but I see what you mean. Never let it be said I ignore the advice of the Evil Overlord List."
Sonata blinked. By the time her eyes opened again, they were standing on the sidewalk, Mr. Discord's car nowhere to be seen. "Where—"
"Back at home. Seems like the safest place for it." Mr. Discord strode towards the prison with a smile on his face. "Ready to face your fellow siren?"
Sonata carefully bit her lip. She'd mangled it more than once after the change. "Does it matter?"
He nodded. "The choice is ultimately yours."
"I just want this feeling to go away... so I guess we have to."
Mr. Discord gave a sadder nod as he led her inside. "Welcome to the joys of maturity, Sonata, where 'obligation' is the word of the day every day."
The lobby was about as bad as the outside. Flickering lights, walls decorated only by stains of indeterminable origin, benches that looked less comfortable than a shattered heartstone, and an earth-aspect woman at the scratched-up front desk who seemed about as soft as the benches.
Mr. Discord breezed up to her with a casual confidence Sonata rarely saw on anyone but Adagio. "We're here to visit a prisoner."
"That's nice," said the woman, not looking up from her magazine. "Make an appointment and we'll get back to you in two to four weeks."
"Then we can see her?" said Sonata.
"No, that's when we'll tell you when you can see her."
Mr. Discord folded his arms. "And when would that be?"
The woman turned a page in her magazine. "Make an appointment and you'll find out in two to four weeks."
Mr. Discord took a deep breath. "Look, we don't want to be here and you clearly don't want us to be here. Therefore, I'm going to make us all happy and patch your surface thoughts into the PA system."
"Wait, what?" The response came in eerie stereo, making the woman look up at the speakers mounted on the walls.
More came from them. "What in the Tree's— I'm not saying tha— That's my voi— Knock it—" The sentence fragments became shorter and shorter and until they dissolved into a feverish cacophony accompanied by the woman screaming aloud.
Sonata put her hands to her ears, trying to block the holes on either side of the fins. It did little to help.
"There we go." Mr. Discord cut off the broadcast with a wave of his hand, then took Sonata by the elbow. "Follow me, Sonata." He walked straight into a wall. The wall knew better than to stop him, and allowed Sonata to come with him.
Once the tinnitus passed, Sonata asked, "What was that about?" Then she spat out the taste of rebar.
"I just needed to instill enough mental confusion in Miss Red Tape back there to suss out our destination from her muddled surface thoughts. I try not to make a habit of this sort of thing, but obstructive bureaucrats and I have never gotten along." He hummed to himself. "In hindsight, I suppose that might have had some lasting impact on CHS's admissions policy. Whatever the case, we're here."
"Yeah, you are," said Aria. Both turned to see her. She was thinner than Sonata had last seen her, almost as bad as when the Black Plague had given them all a dangerous overdose of misery and malaise. Her pigtails were no more, her hair shaved down to green-and-purple stubble. The orange coverall didn't work with any part of her coloration. She cracked scabbed-over knuckles. "And now you can get out." With that, she threw a fist at Sonata.