Now here we all are. We are all gathered next to a wall of Lento's palace. I cast a bubble of magic around us that prevents sound from escaping.
"Celestia and Lento are right behind there," I say to everypony present, many of whom trying to regain their bearings.
"I just realized something," says Twilight. "Once the other ponies under Lento's control realize that there is trouble, they will likely try to stop us. Perhaps it would be best if Discord and Luna confront Celestia and Lento while we," she continues, indicating her pony friends, "stay out of sight and ensure that the other ponies don't interfere, until it is time to use the elements."
"That's true," says Luna. "We must admit, we are so concerned for Celestia's wellbeing that we did not consider the wellbeing of the island's innocent inhabitants as much as we should have. Very well, Discord, we must keep them busy until Twilight and her friends can get the local ponies out of harm's way."
"Come on girls," says Twilight, "With me."
Twilight and her friends start to walk away, but Twilight hesitates, and then comes back, and her friends watch.
She approaches me.
"Discord..." she begins, but seems to have trouble finding further words. She turns her head back toward her friends for a moment and then turns back to me.
She wordlessly motions for me to lower myself down to her, and I comply.
She wraps her hooves around me and hugs me as hard as she can. It's almost like she's trying to squeeze the life out of me, but with my chaos coursing through my body once again and reinforcing it from harm, it doesn't actually hurt any. I hug her back, fully aware that everypony is staring.
She pulls my head in close and whispers into my ear, so quietly that I doubt even Luna with her enhanced hearing can hear it.
"There's more of this if you get Celestia back. So much more."
Instantly I feel myself blush and I have to surreptitiously snap with my tail to put a spell on myself that hides the enormous blush I can feel building up in my face.
"Yes, yes!" I say hastily. "Good luck to you to and all that, Twilight, sheesh, don't get all sappy on me now!"
Twilight smiles and gives me a knowing look.
"What ever happened to your not liking manipulating others with emotions and all that?" I whisper back to her.
She blushes and says nothing.
And then she walks back to her friends and motions for them to follow.
They step outside of my sound barrier and trot away, moving away from Lento's palace.
"Well Lulu, it's just you and me now!" I declare.
"Indeed. We are of the opinion that the best course of action is to barge in and lay down an ultimatum. What say you?"
"Oooh, can I do the 'barge in' part?"
Luna motions toward the wall. "Please."
"Stand back, Princess," I instruct, and she gives me a look. "I wouldn't want you to be hit by falling debris," I explain.
I transform myself into a giant glass pitcher filled with blue liquid, and also with arms and legs, and I run straight at the wall.
"To quote a certain neighbor of Twilight's... OH YEEEEAAAAAAH!"
This exclamation occurs in the same moment that I smash straight through the wall, and my glass body naturally explodes into shards as I do so, dumping unnaturally sticky liquid all over the shiny marble floor. I can still perceive my surroundings with magic, however, and I can see that Lento and Celestia were looking over a map of Equestria.
That doesn't bode well.
Of course, with an entrance like that, they map for the moment lays forgotten and both of them are staring at the gaping hole in the wall.
Luna steps through said hole and stares them both down. Meanwhile, I stay where I am, waiting for a funnier moment to show myself.
"Why would you do that?!" cries the siren in annoyance. "I understand that you're peeved that Celestia didn't come home, but honestly, couldn't you have come through the door like a normal pony instead of punching giant holes in my palace for no reason?"
"Be silent, vile creature!" Luna hisses. "We are only going to say this once. Return my sister and our subjects at once, or suffer our wrath."
"I thought that we would have a few days before anypony noticed my absence," mutters Celestia. "Luna," she cries, approaching Luna. "I am here of my own volition. Queen Lento can do a better job ruling over ponies than we ever did. They will be happier with her in command!"
"Happy because they are forced to be!" Luna utters. "And sister, you know perfectly well how victims of the siren song will find a way to rationalize anything."
"I am doing what I think is right!" insists Celestia. "Please, Luna, I don't want to fight you! But if you continue down this path, I will have no choice!"
"I don't want to fight you either, sister," says Luna, suddenly speaking at a normal volume. "Fortunately for me, however, I don't have to. Because he is going to instead."
Taking the obvious cue, I literally pull myself together and transform into my usual incredibly attractive self. I launch confetti out from myself all around me accompanied by a sheep bleat, and strike a pose.
"Who is that?" asks Lento in confusion.
"That is Discord!" states Celestia in a raised tone of voice. "Between him and my sister, I assure you that he is the far greater threat."
Lento looks dumbfounded at this statement.
"Luna!" shouts Celestia. "I expected you to not understand what I am trying to do here, but have you completely lost your mind? You are siding with the spirit of chaos! How can you stand there and tell me that I am being controlled by my lady when it is obviously far more likely that you are under his!"
Luna doesn't actually answer, but instead blinks and turns to me. "She raises a fair point, Discord. How can I know that?"
I sigh out loud. Do we really have to do this NOW?
"To be honest, there is no way that I can prove that to you. If I give you any proof, you will just suspect that I am warping your mind to accept whatever proof is given. But you trust me, and, also, to be blunt, there is only the possibility that I am mind controlling you. In Celestia's case, it is absolutely certain."
Luna turns back to Celestia. "We are doing what we feel is right, sister."
Celestia gapes at Luna's audacity.
"Luna, look at yourself! You have truly fallen so very low! You are once again ignoring the council of your own sister and instead listening to a monster!"
"How dare you!" bellows Luna, but then she clenches her eyes closed for a second and calms herself. She opens them again. "If I was not certain that you are not yourself right now, I would be deeply hurt by that remark. But it is obvious that conversation is getting us nowhere!"
"Indeed not," I agree in a bored tone. I snap and transform the whole palace into the world's longest continuous strand of yarn, and it immediately collapses all around us into heaps of rainbow colored yarn mountains.
"My palace!" shrieks Lento in rage. And then she starts singing more of her stupid vocal music.
Celestia sends out a burst of magic that instantly shreds the yarn that fell around her and then charges up again.
I'm not just going to stand by and let her do that though. I materialize eight pies of all different flavors around Celestia and make them converge on her location, but she flies out of the way with the agility of a hummingbird.
"This is just another example of my foolishness before meeting my lady!" cries Celestia. "Releasing YOU!"
She rears her head back and gathers a lot of magic into that spear on her head that she calls a horn, and then thrusts it forward and releases the magic as a three foot wide beam.
I counter this with a giant mirror, which I use to reflect the beam into the sky.
"Ohohohohoho!" I laugh aloud in delight. "Now this is exactly what I was hoping for ever since you put me in that stone bodysuit! Have at you!"
*SNAP*
I invert gravity under Celestia and I and allow it to carry us both up into the now open sky. Celestia is taken by surprise, but quickly uprights herself and launches some sort of crackling white energy orb at me. It's odd though, it doesn't seem to travel very fast.
I throw up a brick wall with a window in it between myself and the crazed sun princess.
And then I don a service hat and open up the window and lean out. I snap and create a notebook and pencil in my paw.
"Welcome to Discord's Delectable Dietary Diner, may I take your order?"
Celestia grunts in annoyance and sends a ball of magic careening through the window, naturally.
"So that's fifty seven quarts of strawberry-banana yogurt?"
A fireball flies in next.
"Oh, my mistake, fifty seven quarts of the strawberry-banana yogurt flambé! It would have to be, the kitchen is on fire now."
The crackling energy orb is getting a little too close for comfort, but a simple teleportation takes care of that problem.
*SNAP*
Oh, no wait, it's turning around and coming at me again.
Does that thing ever fizzle out?
Celestia tries to fly around my wall, but I just simply rotate it through the air between us.
"Look, if you have a complaint, you'll have to fill out a form," I say, producing a complaint form and holding it out to her.
"Also, order up!"
I form the fifty-seven quarts of yogurt into a blob and give it a spark of animation, and then send it crawling through the window.
Celestia blasts it wish a heat ray or something, because it inflates to about five times it's size and explodes, covering me with searing hot goop (which doesn't actually hurt, thank chaos for... well, chaos magic). Celestia put up a shield bubble which absorbed all of the stuff that flew in her direction. She then drops the shield and the stuff drops into the ocean below us, for that is where we are right now. It's a little bit hard to keep her where I want her.
I pretend to have an expression of annoyance.
"If you think you can cook it better, be my guest!" I shout, and I throw a frying pan at her.
Of course, this is easily stopped by her, and then she sends it back through the window.
All the while, I keep on throwing more kitchen tools through the window. A few plates, a ladle, a salt shaker, a rolling pin, a pot, a pressure cooker, a dish washer.
When Celestia hurls the rolling pin back at me, I catch it and use it to whack the crackling energy orb away from me like a baseball. And then I toss it back again. And then I throw some more plates and pots and pans enchanted with a teeny little enlargement spell.
Each of these things halt in midair, fifty times their original size, making a staggered but usable surface to stand on.
I step away from the diner wall and onto one of the plates, letting the next spell that Celestia launches blow up the wall. She then lowers herself onto my new plate platforms.
"Enough games, Discord!" she shouts in annoyance.
"No! Wait, Princess, stop!" I shout, holding out my paw in a 'stop' gesture.
Celestia actually listens to me and stops just short of stepping off of one of the pans and onto a pot.
"Don't get on the pot, Celestia! It will ruin your life!"
Celestia cries out her annoyance at this pun and flies at me herself, horn charged.
I teleport out of the way and reappear on the plate where Celestia came from.
In three different places.
"Ready, everydraconequus?" I shout out.
"Ready, boss!" answer the other two.
I reach out and find one of the endpoints on the yarn that used to be Lento's palace, and start pulling it way up here all the way from the ground. Celestia starts shooting magic at us again and my other two selves pick me up and hold me high over their heads and they run back and forth dodging Celestia's magic.
Meanwhile, I finally pulled that yarn up here. I give it to one of my dopplegangers and he gives a part of it to the other one. They back away from me and start swinging both sections of yarn between them like jump ropes. I start jumping them both, and I snap and another copy of myself appears alongside me, also jumping. The crackling white magic ball comes drifting our way again, which is annoying.
The two copies of myself that are holding the ropes start passing more yarn along, and the one holding the end is using his magic to knit the yarn into yarn dolls shaped like all sorts of different winged creatures. The first one is shaped like a winged elephant. After there are about a couple dozen or so, I make them fly at Celestia.
Celestia sends out some sort of a pulse of magic that throws the poor things far, far away.
Also, I snatch white magic orb as it draws near, intending to pump a counterspell into it so that the thing will stop following me around.
Only it explodes.
I temporarily lose track of which way is up, and before I can bring myself to a halt, I find myself in an unpleasant reunion with the ground. The impact causes my doppleganger magic to fail and I suddenly feel my divided consciousness reunite.
"Discord!"
That wasn't Celestia's voice...
I shrug off the pain and look up and see Twilight filling up my vision.
"Are you okay?" she cries. "What happened?"
"Never better," I grumble, floating myself off the ground again to prove it.
"We only just finished dealing with some of the local ponies," says Twilight. "I had to stun them all, I'm afraid. Where is Princess Celestia?"
I look up at the section of the sky where I fell from.
"She's probably about to- WHOA NOW!"
Those last words were spoken out of reflex, and I had no time to do anything about Celestia's flaming form pile driving me into the ground.
My head is spinning and I suddenly can't make out anything around me except for voices.
Uh oh.
"Princess!" I hear Twilight cry out. "You're hurting him!"
There is a moment in which nonpony says a word, although I can hear Lento's singing, and I'm pretty sure I can hear Luna blasting magic at her.
By chaos, Lento sounds AAAANGRRRY.
"Twilight Sparkle!" I hear Celestia say in surprise. "Luna brought you all here?"
My senses come back to me sooner than I thought they would.
Actually, I can already see again. In fact, I feel fine!
I stand up and discover that I've been crushed partway into the dirt. I teleport myself out and over Celestia.
She hears it though and she looks up at me with a spell on her horn.
I summon a broom and whack her in the face with the bushy side. This causes her to lose focus, and she grunts in frustration and pushes against the handle with her horn. She starts applying both physical force and magical force to the broom, and I can't figure out why she isn't just getting out of the way and shooting at me some more. I have to use magic of my own to stop her from ripping the broom away from me though. Oh, and she's also using her wings to add that to the already crushing forces. If this wasn't a magically conjured broom reinforced by my incredibly impressive supply of chaos magic, it would be crushed into splinters about a thousand times over. She's putting enough force into it to crush a rock into a diamond.
We both start slowly rising into the air again.
"Princess!" cries Twilight frantically.
Wait, why is she trying to call out to Celestia? I wonder to myself. Shouldn't she just shoot her with the elements?
Oh, of course not. She would totally see that coming.
"Princess Celelestia!" Twilight cries again. "You don't have to do this! Discord is reformed now! He's not going to hurt anypony anymore!"
“Twilight Sparkle!” shouts Celestia, struggling to speak with all of the power she is exerting. “I am aware that I was the one who asked you to reform Discord, but I realize now that that was yet another one of my many mistakes! Discord is inherently evil, and there is no way that that will ever change! If you need proof, simply look around you! He has manipulated my poor sister into opposing me, but you can't let him trick you too! Not again! Use the elements on Discord, now!"
I actually let my grasp on the broom stagger when I hear this, and Celestia almost manages to overpower me. I have to redouble my efforts in order to gain the advantage again.
What the cherry cheesecake, this is that nightmare that that stupid mushroom showed me back when I first discovered that darned cave!
"Princess... please..." cries Twilight.
"There is no time to discuss the matter, Twilight Sparkle! I am still your teacher, and I'm ordering you to do this! Everything will work out in the end, I promise!"
"... Yes, Princess." Gone is Twilights, tearful tone, replaced entirely by a sort of sad determination. "You're right. It will. Girls, elements."
Twilights friends give her shocked looks.
"Twi," begins Rainbow Dash, "are you sure about-"
"Yes!" snaps Twilight. "Trust me!"
Ohhhh, I get it! Suddenly, the pieces of this puzzle all fall into place!
I turn back to my opponent and grin at her disconcertingly.
And I get to play the fiddle!
I create a fiddle and start doing exactly that with my tail.
"It will never wo-ork," I taunt in sing song.
A pulse of energy shoots into the broom and almost breaks my concentration.
"You can't win, Princess. If you strike me down, I shall return more powerful than you could ever imagine!"
"There's no use in trying to confuse us, Discord!" growls Celestia, staring me down with hatred which I know is not truly her own. "You're finished."
Even though I am fully expecting it, my I feel like my lungs have dropped out of my body when I realize that a certain beam of rainbow is hurling in our direction.
And then it slams into Celestia, avoiding me entirely.
Celestia's magic is cut off and I have to stop putting force behind the broom to keep from hurling her into the atmosphere. Her eyes fly wide open in complete and utter shock, but only for a moment, and then her pupils roll up into her head and she starts to fall.
I realize that we are about twenty feet off the ground. She'd shrug a fall like that off quite easily, sure, but, well, why not?
I snap and create a stack of a dozen mattresses below her, which she lands on, unharmed.
I snap again and appear next to Twilight.
"Now that that's all over, I feel a little bit disappointed. It was just getting interesting! I wonder, do you think Celestia would agree to do this again, later? She could use the practice, what with all of the villains that keep showing up these days."
"Most magic duels are over in mere seconds," Twilight points out. "Let's just focus on the matter at hoof, Discord. Luna is still-"
"Cellestia!" cries Luna's voice.
I look to her in surprise, not expecting her to deal with the siren so quickly.
Or did she?
"Where's Lento?" I ask her as she flies up to the top of my mattress stack.
"That fiend quickly realized that she was outmatched and fled into the sea," answers Luna. "She is far faster in the water than I, and I could not pursue her."
"Give me a moment," I say, and then I reach out with my senses and easily find the Siren's magical signature. She's swimming circles around the island.
*SNAP*
And now, without Celestia protecting her, Lento is completely vulnerable to my power. I now have her floating in my magical grasp, shrunken to the size of a mouse.
I take a look at her and realize that her originally smooth and uniformly green scales are now battered and bruised. And what's more, when the pathetic creature realizes where she is, she tries to sing again, but her she suddenly erupts into a coarse coughing fit.
I look at Luna. "Ouch."
"She deserves it all, and more," answers Luna without guilt.
"I... HATE... you..." the reduced siren squeaks out in a strained voice.
"Aw, there's no call for that!" I answer back. "Well, actually, I suppose there kind of is, and, actually, I don't care in the least if you hate me. I have plenty of experience in not caring about that. But cheer up, I'm not going to hurt you!"
I remember Luna's comment about how Starswirl apparently already banished three sirens to another world already. It seems to have done a fine job of holding them so far, so one more siren couldn't hurt. But first I have to find it. If I can actually find it at all. I search with my magic into extra-dimensional space, searching for any signs of that world.
Wait, I think I found it! There is barely any magic at all, but that just means that even the dim ambience of the sirens banished there long ago still stands out like a candle in the dark. No wonder I never noticed it before, you have to be looking for it to even notice it. It's perfect!
I tear open a rift in front of Lento. The simple forest beyond isn't anything special, but I did pick a spot where none of the inhabitants on the other side would be watching. The last thing we need is for one of them to jump through the rift uninvited.
"I'm just going to put you in another dimension! I mean, sure, there's so little magic in this place that you'll never regain very much of your power, but I'm actually doing you a favor. I was looking for the perfect place to put you and I found that this particular dimension already has three others in it already that are just like you! Maybe you'll become the bestest of friends!"
With a snap, I rotate Lento's gravity toward the rift and release her.
She 'falls' through, mouth open wide in rage, but screaming only silently.
The moment she passes through, her body flashes and transforms into one of the bipedal natives of that world, normally sized for them though, as my magic was undone as soon as she passed through. She collapses in a tangle of limbs on the grass, but still is able to turn her head back and look at herself in horror, and then back at the rift.
"Tee tee eff inn!" I say with a wave, and with a gesture of my tail, the rift seals.
"Discord, what just happened," says Twilight in confusion. "Why did she-"
"Morphic field between dimensions," I answer. "It happens."
I turn around and look at my mattress stack and see that Celestia is already wide awake and staring down at us from on high.
I feel myself clench up with nervousness.
I wonder if she remembers what happened while she was under the siren song.
Luna has realized that Celestia is looking at us all too and dives onto her sister, wrapping her in an embrace.
"Thou shalt not leaving our sight for a month!" cries Luna.
" 'You will not', Luna," answers Celestia. "You are slipping into middle Equestrian again."
Luna looks at Celestia incredulously.
"That is not important right now! Are you okay? Any lingering ill effects?"
"I am fine, sister."
I snap and make myself appear next to them. "Are you quite sure about that?" I ask. "Nothing feels just a little bit... off?"
"The siren has no control over me now," says Celestia with a frown. "I assure you."
"Besides that I mean. Come on, you don't feel anything?"
Both princesses narrow their eyes at me. "What did you do?" demands Luna.
"Hmm, maybe you're not really a princess after all," I say cryptically. I reach under the mattress tower. "You see, I hid a pea under all these mattresses and-"
My words are left forgotten as I stare down at what I plucked out from under the mattresses. Its just a green smear, flattened like a pancake.
"Oh, wait, that explains it!" I shout up to the top of the mattresses. "Celestia crushed it into oblivion with her flanks. And through all of those mattresses too!"