//------------------------------//
// Intermezzo 
// Story: Getting the Band Back Together 
// by FanOfMostEverything 
//------------------------------//

"Now don't get too comfortable, girls," Mr. Discord said as he led the two sirens inside the bungalow. "I expect we'll back on the road shortly."

Aria looked around, taking in the entryway. "Huh."

Mr. Discord paused and looked back from a doorway. "Something the matter?"

"It's just... not what I expected from Reiipivzheerv." Aria picked up a framed photo of a much younger Mr. Discord with a bunch of other people, presumably his family. "No booming dissonance to consume my song and drown out the echoes. Everything's so..."

"Normal?" said Sonata.

"Yeah."

Mr. Discord gestured towards the kitchen. "I will note the creative use of gravity to make the most of the walls' storage space."

That got a shrug. "I'm from the ocean, remember? Up and down isn't a big deal for me. I'm more surprised that you even have walls."

"Ah, I see what you mean. I can't speak for the Discord you know, but I personally find them quite useful."

"How about I make lunch while we're here?" said Sonata, who'd made her way to the kitchen at some point.

Mr. Discord nodded. "Excellent idea. Thank you, Sonata."

"I'm not hun—" Aria's stomach chose that moment to not so much growl as roar. She flushed and glared at Mr. Discord.

He followed Sonata into the kitchen, wearing a smug grin. "I might have amplified it a little, but you're clearly not eating enough."

Aria looked away. "It's not that big a—" Another gastric roar cut her off. She renewed her glare, stomping into the kitchen herself.

Mr. Discord rolled his eyes. "Oh, put that away." He tore the look off her face like a sticky note, revealing a far more befuddled expression beneath it. "This is hardly the first time I've dealt with a moody teenager who resents the demands of her meat body, and you, my dear, have nothing on Luna when it comes to death glares." He shook out the face still in his hand, turning it blue and... mildly more intimidating.

Aria crossed her arms nonetheless. "I'm hundreds of years old."

"Then act like it." Mr, Discord shrugged. "Or keep acting like a teenager, since acting like you're a multicentennial means acting like a few well-nibbled bone fragments. Regardless, you need the calories, and I will teleport the food directly into your stomach if I need to." He cracked his knuckles with a sound unsettlingly like cocking a shotgun. "I can't promise that will end well."

Aria blanched. Sonata chose that moment to chime in. "Come over here, Aria! You can help me pick out what looks good to you."

Aria turned and boggled at the only sign of Sonata's presence, a pair of feet sticking out of what seemed to be an ordinary refrigerator, albeit one on the ceiling. A better angle revealed an icy cavern on the other side of the open door. "Okay, that's a bit more like what I expected."

"I'll try to keep the sanity shredding to a minimum," said Mr. Discord, nonchalantly folding the peeled face into a pocket square. "Now, I trust you two can fend for yourselves. I'll slap something together for myself and go look for your old ringleader."

Aria snorted. "I'd say good luck, but I don't want you to find her."

Sonata's legs drooped. "And she probably doesn't want to be found."

"You let me worry about that for now. I'll pick your brains if I hit a dead end. And don't worry, Aria, I didn't mean it literally." After a beat, Mr. Discord added, "This time."

Aria told herself that this time, her glare managed to chase him out of the room.

"Hey, Aria, do you like spicy stuff?"

She shrugged. "Sure, why not?"





Somehow, Mr. Discord's calm smile was more infuriating than a shit-eating grin ever could be. "So, what have we learned?"

"Never let Sonata recommend food. Ever." Aria choked down her third glass of milk, tried not to think about where it came from, and failed to do so.

"Come back to that after you've gotten more experience with that digestive system." Mr. Discord turned to the other side of the table. "Sonata?"

After a few moments to think, Sonata said, "Remember that Aria doesn't know how flavors work?"

Aria slammed the glass on the table. "Seriously, why would you deliberately eat anything that makes your mouth burn?"

"Humans are smart enough to be that stupid." Mr. Discord leaned back in his chair and sighed. "In any case, you've both definitely learned more than I managed to. The only reference to an Adagio Dazzle that seems pertinent is a semi-obscure late 18th-century pirate also known as 'Sailor-be-Warned' for how her hair resembled clouds at dawn." He adjusted the eyepatch he hadn't been wearing a moment before from one eye to the other. The parrot on his shoulder said, "Sound familiar, girls?"

Sonata gave a happy sigh. "That was fun. Like the old days."

"Yeah, the Vengeful Siren didn't completely suck." Aria crossed her arms. "Though Adagio just had to make herself the figurehead."

"And we probably shouldn't have used our own crew's misery and resentment as a food source between raids."

Aria shrugged. "Meh. They knew what they were getting into."

Mr. Discord quirked an eyebrow. "Did they, now?"

Aria leaned back herself, putting her arms behind her head. "Sure. They kept going on about how it was bad luck to have a woman on board a ship. We didn't want to disappoint them. Besides, do you know what ports used to charge for limes?"

"So, mutiny?"

"So much mutiny," Sonata said, laughing. "I'm pretty sure the mutiny had a mutiny five minutes later. We got enough power to make the swim to Prance a piece of cake."

"Yeah, but we still had to swim to Prance," countered Aria. "That was hundreds of miles away."

Sonata grinned at her. "I know I saw you smile on the way there."

"That was just the rush from the mutinies."

"Much as I hate to derail this fascinating conversation," said Mr. Discord, "I don't suppose either of you could give me any further insight as to Adagio's whereabouts?"

Aria scowled at him. "Why didn't you just ask us in the first place?"

"For one, I thought I'd give you two a chance to catch up." Mr. Discord let that hang in the air for a moment, along with the still-lingering scent of habaneros. "For another, I wanted to see if you actually would try to kill each other if left unsupervised, which I'm very pleased to see is not the case."

"Not intentionally, anyway," Aria muttered.

"Lastly, you've made it abundantly clear that you don't care where she is, so I didn't think you had the specific information available. That said, if you have something a bit more general, I'd love to hear it. You know her far better than I do, so your best guess would be much better than mine."

"Hmm..." Sonata tapped her chin. "She might still be using the Dazzlings' MyStable page."

Aria blinked. "Shit, she did make one of those, didn't she?"

"It's certainly worth a look," Mr. Discord said with a shrug.

The page proved to have the social media equivalent of cobwebs and and past due notices strewn about it. The most recent activity was a few very unflattering comments made by Canterlot High students a few months ago, the same students who'd posted gushing praise that bordered on religious ecstasy only days earlier. There was no hint about Adagio's current location to be found, but Mr. Discord could at least isolate her from a group photo. From there, it was a quick hop over to Gillion, a reverse image search...

And a resounding one pertinent result. The very MyStable page he'd just looked at. The rest were Immediagram posts of clouds at twilight, shopping sites offering deals on orange yarn, or similar examples of artificial stupidity at work.

"Hmm," Mr. Discord said to himself. "The key word there may be 'artificial.' This algorithm should be better than this."

"If Adagio doesn't want to be found, she probably won't be," Sonata said over his shoulder. "She's really good at hiding in the melody."

"Is that so?" Mr. Discord smirked. "Challenge accepted." He snapped his fingers and enveloped himself in a mostly regular gridline pattern. Bits of his body flew into the computer monitor, zig-zagging from top to bottom until only the wireframe remained before it too faded away.

After a few moments, Aria said, "Dibs on his stuff."

Sonata pouted. "He's not dead."

"Dibs anyway. He can make more."





Mr. Discord looked around the featureless white expanse. Well, mostly featureless. Around him, the white gave way to psychedelic swirls of color like sunlight on an oil slick. The strange brilliance reflected oddly off the carapaces of segmentation faults and the hides of chromatic aberrations.

A cool blue barrier snapped into place around Mr. Discord and his growing brood. An androgynous figure appeared before him. Though its head was a large capital G floating above its neckless shoulders, it still gave the impression of glaring at him. "You are error."

Mr. Discord raised his eyebrows. "I'm impressed. I didn't know it was possible to snarl serenely." After a drawn-out silence, he sighed. "Not much for banter, are you?"

"I have nothing to say to you."

"Hmm." Mr. Discord considered the burbling menagerie cavorting about his ankles. "Yes, I suppose chaos magic and the meticulous world of cyberspace don't mix well. Don't worry, I won't be here long." With a flick of his wrist, he called up the image of Adagio from his own memory. "I just need a reverse image search. One without anyone else's magical interference." The image moved through the barrier as though it weren't there.

The avatar of Gillion made no move to take or even acknowledge the image's presence. "Error: Unrecognized file format."

"This is why I never had much patience for programming," Mr. Discord said with a roll of his eyes. He chopped his hand down, and the image struck Gillion right between where its eyes would've been.

"Now searching."

"That's more like it."





Empty space opened like a door, allowing Mr. Discord to step back into his rumpus room. "Excellent news, girls! We have a..." Mr. Discord trailed off as he took in his surroundings. Much of the room's furnishings and decorations had been thrown about, though the computer itself was somehow undisturbed. The apparent culprits each had one of the other's arms in their mouths, and judging by the bruises, bite marks, and torn clothing, had come out of the event about as well as the room itself.

Sonata worked her jaws free first. "She was gonna take your stuff!"

Mr. Discord looked at his watch. "You know, I'm fairly certain I spent less than twenty seconds within the Internet. If Adagio really was able to keep the two of you alive for centuries, then she has a monumental share of my respect. How about we go tell her in person?"

"Uh..."

"Yeah, sure, let's go with that," said Aria.

"Wonderful. And when we get back, she and I can supervise as you clean this up."

If Mr. Discord closed his eyes, he could imagine that the resulting groans came from two very different siblings a generation ago. He smiled, shook his head, and went out to grab his car keys. The sirens followed in his wake.

"So where are we going, anyway?" Aria said as they got in the car.

"It's an amusing parallel; Adagio went and did what I told my parents I would do one day." A few chuckles leaked out of Mr. Discord before he could properly compose himself. Not all of them left through his mouth.

"What?" said Sonata.

"She ran away to join the circus."