Without a second thought, Spike opened his mouth and let fly the sort of deep juicy belch that always got him glares back home. He could almost see the burp shooting into the early evening sky above the barn at Sweet Apple Acres like a punctured balloon, and that made him grin. "This is so great!" He looked over at the guys in the other three lawn chairs. "So great!" he had to say again.
Shining Armor settled deeper into the chair nearest Spike. "I'm glad I could get down here for another session." He nodded to Discord, more coiled around the next chair over than sitting in it. "I mean, stepping into the game like that? It's exactly the sort of thing we used to dream about when we were playing Ogres & Oubliettes back in Mom and Dad's basement."
"That's me." Discord blew a glowing yellow smoke ring, and Spike suddenly smelled bananas. "Making dreams come true everywhere I go."
That got a snort from Big Mac, stretched over his chair with his front hooves up behind his head. "A regular Tooth Fairy, now, ain'tcha?"
A tiny tiara appeared between Discord's mismatched horns. "I also collect horn shavings, hoof trimmings, and shed feathers." He waggled his bushy eyebrows. "I'm trying to make new friends. From scratch, I mean!"
Even knowing that Discord was joking—or at least hoping that Discord was joking—Spike couldn't help swallowing. But Mac was giving one of his big laughs, and when Shiny joined in, Spike managed to quietly pry his claws out of the lawn chair's wooden arms.
"And lemme tell you!" Closing his eyes, Shiny wiped a foreleg across his brow. "A little 'R & R' is just what I needed after the week we had up north!"
"Oh?" Glad for the change in subject, Spike sat forward. "Why? What happened?"
"Ice worms!" Shiny held up his front hooves, barely any space between them. "Usually, they're like this big, and they dig around in the glaciers outside the Crystal Heart's effect radius as nice and quiet as you like. But Monday morning?" He grimaced. "A couple patrolsteeds come galloping into the palace shouting about ice worms bigger than ponies busting up through the fountain out in West Park!"
"Whoa!" Spike's gut clenched, but then he remembered that the Crystal Empire didn't have any statues of him in West Park.
"Which pretty much ended breakfast," Shiny was going on. "I grab my helmet, charge out there with a full brigade, and it's a mess: giant worms flopping around, smashing gazebos, panicking the populace. And the things're huge! Thick as those barrels and three times as long at least!" He gestured to a stack of apple barrels against the wall of the barn. "We drive 'em right back into the hole they'd made in the fountain, of course, but, well, somepony's got to go down there and see what's what, right?"
Mac nodded. "Meaning you."
Shiny grinned. "That's why they give me the epaulets." He tapped his horn. "So I light up, march on in, zap the worms till they're thundering off in the other direction, start digging around in the slush and the mud, and what do I find?" He held up his hooves again about the same distance apart. "Another little sliver of Sombra's horn! I mean, every time I think we've rounded up the last slice of that thing..."
It took some swallowing before Spike could ask, "So what did you do?"
"The usual." Shiny settled back in his chair. "Cady came out with the containment squad, then the troops and I had to stomp around in the snow for the next four days with those amulets she made till we'd dissipated the residual dark magic and transformed all the flora and fauna back to their regular degrees of lethality." He blew out a breath. "So I was ready for a weekend off."
"Huh," Mac said. "Same here."
Spike blinked at him. "You had to deal with ice worms?"
"Dust devils." Mac gestured to the orchard on the other side of the fence. "We get 'em through here maybe once every four, five years, but these'uns was more solid'n any I ever seen: head, tail, four legs, the works. Dang things was charging 'round the rows, tipping over carts, crashing into crates, and shaking the apples down afore they was ready."
"Wow." Shiny looked from the trees to Mac. "There a spell for that?"
"They're just dust." Mac grinned. "Don't stand up to rain at all. Course, after the pegasi push the storm back out, we gotta slog through the mud and gather up the clumps of hair and bits of hoof you always find inside a devil or else they're like as to form right back up again. But you put the chunks in a wet canvas sack, then wash 'em down the river in the light of the new dawn, and you're set. So yeah." He gave Spike a nod. "Nice idea, having a game after all that."
"Oh, it wasn't me." Spike waved to Discord, crunching on a colorful little umbrella from a glass that seemed to be packed entirely full of them. "Discord brought it up, and after the week I've had..."
Shiny laughed. "Twily running you ragged again?"
"No, it was—" The memory made his shoulders tighten, but a quick wriggle loosened them. "I was fetching some alchemical reagents for her on Wednesday when I noticed a bunch of the jars looked weird. I went back later to check, and they all had this, I dunno, this fluff inside. I thought maybe it was mold, but it was too light, more like that stuff you blow off dandelions, y'know?"
"Huh." Mac rubbed his snout. "Reckon that ain't normal?"
"Not hardly." Spike didn't want to go into the whole theory and practice of proper reagent maintenance, so he just said, "The stuff's really reactive, so if it gets too hot or too cold or too dry or too wet or you touch it with too much magic, it pretty much explodes. That's why you keep it in such tiny jars: a buncha little pops is way better than a big, wall-shattering ka-boom." He rolled his eyes. "We learned that the hard way."
"Did you, now?" Shiny's forehead was wrinkling into what Spike always thought of as his 'big brother' face: not really mad and not really worried but also kind of both. "This something I need to get interested in?"
"No, no, no!" Spike tried to give an easy grin, but since he could feel the evening breeze cool against his gums, he was pretty sure he was showing way too many teeth. "Like I said, tiny jars totally fix everything."
"Hmmm," was all Shiny said, so Spike rushed back to his story:
"Except it meant I had to open each jar myself, pull the fluff out, then put the jar under the passive oscillometer to make sure the reagents hadn't gone bad! Took me three days to do the whole cabinet! And the weirdest thing?" Spike spread his claws. "Twilight looked at the fuzz and said it was from pegasus wings! I mean, how did feather fluff get into our reagent jars?"
"Feather fluff?" His eyes narrow, Mac was looking at Discord. "Maybe from the Tooth Fairy? Like hoof trimmings to get dust devils started and horn shavings to magic them ice worms?"
Spike scratched his head, but before he could ask what Mac was talking about, Shiny spoke up, his eyes narrowing at Discord, too. "Well, now I find myself all interested in what you might've gotten into this week."
"Me?" Discord touched his lion paw to his chest. "Oh, nothing to speak of, I assure you. Once I'd sent you your invitations to Game Day, of course, I mean." He snapped, and glasses of something sparkling and orange appeared in the cupholders of all their chairs. "I've noticed you ponies always seem to enjoy a day off more when you think you've earned it."
All Spike could do was blink some more, the other two scowling while Discord brayed a laugh. "Just you wait, though!" A large pink notebook with drawings of grinning unicorn heads popped into the air in front of him, the words My Monthly Planner in loopy purple letters across the front. "I've got some even better ideas for my invitations next time, but—" He opened his mouth wider than it should've been able to open and swallowed the notebook whole. "None of you get to see! I want them to be a surprise!"
"Okay," Shiny said, his ears folded tight against his mane. "But can I make a suggestion? Like, oh, I don't know, maybe not threatening the health and welfare of the Crystal Empire's citizenry just to send out a Game Day invitation? I mean, you start mixing up fantasy and reality that way, you might just hear calls for that stone tuxedo of yours to come back into fashion."
The smirk melted from Discord's face like a midsummer ice cream cone. "I...I beg your pardon?"
"Eeyup." Mac jerked his chin toward the house down the hill from where they all sat. "Reckon you know AJ well enough to figure how peeved she's like to get if'n she knew the truth 'bout them dust devils."
"Whoa, now!" Discord held up his paws and claws. "Fellas! No need to go dragging the truth into things! It's all just fun and games here, right?"
"Exactly." The hoof that Shiny aimed at Discord made Spike suddenly think of a sword. "When it's in the game, it's fun. You let it get outside the game, and then, well, then Cadance and Twilight start getting involved. And that could prove to be a little less than fun." He shrugged. "I mean, Cadance rolls the luckiest dice I've ever seen in my life, and Twily is pretty much the ultimate rules lawyer. I wouldn't wish either of them on any Game Master."
Discord's eyebrows bunched up into little thunderheads, and for a minute, Spike thought things might get stormy. But with a sigh, Discord blew the clouds away. "Fine," he said, folding his arms. Something flashed beside his head, and a tiny version of himself was hovering there whispering into his ear. "Oh, hey!" The tiny him vanished, and a grin squiggled across Discord's face. "If I don't use my brilliant ideas for the invitations, I can use them in the game!"
The waver of Shiny's hornglow reached out and picked up the glass of orange stuff. "See? A place for everything, and everything in its place."
Mac was nodding, but Discord's mouth shifted sideways. "Hmmm," he more growled than said. "That sounds suspiciously like a lesson."
"Nah." Shiny sipped from the glass. "The lesson is: what happens in the game, stays in the game. That way, we end up with fewer bitter recriminations, magical duels, and squadrons of royal guards from various sovereign nations trampling anypony's flower beds. Although..." His expression tightened Spike's stomach again. "If you've got any more of Sombra's horn lying around, I'll really have to insist you donate it to Cadance's collection. All of it."
"Oh, don't worry about that." Discord was running miniature rakes over his forehead, his eyebrows sprouting back even as Spike watched. "You two have the whole nasty thing locked up in your storage vault. I just borrow bits of it whenever I need some."
Shiny made a choking noise, then he closed his eyes and took a breath. "Okay, but how 'bout instead—" His eyes flew open, and he burped up a banana-scented yellow smoke ring. "Well, now!" Grinning, he looked back at his glass. "I'm gonna need a six-pack or two of this." He took another sip.
With a laugh, Mac wrapped his hooves around his drink, and the tightness in Spike's stomach started loosening. He picked up his own glass, the orange stuff smelling like liquid beryl, and said, "And y'know, Discord, you can come over to the castle and use any of my construction paper or glue or whatever to make your invitations."
"Really?" Discord's eyes lit up the color of lemon custard pie in the gathering darkness. "I can use whatever's in the castle, you say?"
Spike sighed. "Nice try, but no. You might wanna pick up your feather fluff, though." He waved in the general direction of town. "Twilight said she was gonna try some tracer spells to see if she could figure out where it came from."
Discord's eyes sputtered and went dark. "If you'll excuse me a moment?" And he puffed away like fog when the wind's picked up.
The little silence settling around them was broken by both Shiny and Mac burping twin banana rings. Grinning at each other, they clinked their glasses, and Spike was just trying his drink—turned out it was citrine instead of beryl, so he took a great big swallow—when a thought hit him. "Hey, wait a minute. We had a mad wizard send each of us an individual challenge in order to lure us into his fiendish oubliette of death, didn't we?"
Mac and Shiny cranked their necks around to face him, their brows wrinkled.
"Not at all!" Discord flashed back into his chair, his talons clutching a pillowcase with a few blue and pink bits of fuzz drifting from it. "I'm more whimsically erratic than mad these days!"
"But still." Spike looked at the other three in turn. "I mean, if that's what our lives are like, why do we play this game again?"
Another chunk of silence froze the air around them, and even though Discord opened his mouth, nothing came out: he just sat there with one claw raised till the clattering clang of the suppertime triangle started ringing. "You boys come 'n' get it!" Granny Smith's voice drifted through the evening. "I fried up another batcha them peanut shell fritters for you, Discord!"
Discord sprang straight up. "Coming, Granny!" he shouted, and a big blue and white striped bib crackled into place around his neck. "Well, I certainly can't speak for you gentlecolts," he said, "but I'm here for the cuisine." He snapped his claws and vanished with a powdery puff that smelled like buttered toast.
"And that," Shiny said with a toss of his head, "is why we play this game."
That made Spike blink a little bit more, but he thought he got it. "To have fun with our friends, y'mean?"
"Eeyup." Hopping to his hooves, Mac arched an eyebrow at Shiny. "Race you?"
Shiny laughed. "You're on!" His horn flared, and Spike felt the familiar warmth of Shiny's magic wrap around him, lifting him from the chair and setting him onto Shiny's broad back. "Give us the count, Spike!"
Spike grabbed Shiny's mane. "On your mark! Get set! Go!" And he couldn't help whooping as the three of them thundered off down the hill.