Twilight hummed happily to herself. She'd just finished her weekly reshelving, Spike had been given the day off, and there was nothing between her, a hot mug of cocoa, and the newest Daring Do book. She only hoped Dash had already read it; there was no way she was going to be able to keep the spoilers to herself. All in all, it was a delightfully relaxing Saturday.
"Twilight Sparkle! It's been too long."
She sighed. It had been a relaxing Saturday. "I had brunch with you and Fluttershy, Discord," she reminded him.
Discord wiggled around in the air and looked at her upside down. "Yes, and that was hours ago! Ages! I thought I ought to check in on one of my very best friends, you know, see how it's going and all that."
"How what's going?" Twilight asked, before realizing she probably didn't want to hear the answer.
Discord shrugged. "You know. It." He flipped right side up and followed Twilight on her walk to the sitting room next to the library. "I have a story for you," he said without preamble.
Twilight halted and eyed him. "You have a story for me," she repeated. Discord nodded eagerly. Twilight narrowed her eyes. "Is the story 'I broke something and now ponies are mad at me, please come and fix it'?"
Discord looked appalled and hurt. It said something that Twilight wasn't sure if he was genuinely wounded or just messing with her. "Why, Princess! I am shocked, shocked, that you would think such a thing of me. Would I ever do something like that?"
"Yes," Twilight pointed out.
Discord waved this off. "Anyway, it's nothing like that. In fact, I wanted to tell you about someone who might be a threat to Equestria. She was old even when I was making Equestria a more interesting place, though last I heard she had... well, call it retired."
The part of Twilight's brain that had been wishing Discord would just go away and leave her alone suddenly started paying real attention. "A threat? Should I call the other Bearers?"
Discord frowned, then shook his head. "I really haven't heard from her since my imprisonment. I don't think she's up to anything right now, just that you should know about her. In case."
"In case," Twilight said grimly. "Okay. Who is this and what do you know?"
"Her name is Quiet Author. She's my... well, my aunt." Discord looked sheepish.
Twilight stared. "You have an aunt?" she asked, barely keeping herself from making it You have parents?
He grimaced. "In a manner of speaking. I'm the Spirit of Disharmony; she's the Spirit of Disease. She's... much less fun than I am."
Twilight shuddered. "I can imagine."
"Right. And, frankly, I've never really liked her. After the initial panic it's all so boring. Anyway, the last time she came around, ponies were just starting to figure out the whole hygiene thing, washing your hooves, don't sneeze in other ponies' faces, things like that. The leader of this new movement was named May Canoe."
"What?"
"What what?"
Twilight wrinkled her nose. "What kind of a name is May Canoe? That doesn't even mean anything."
"Well, this was a long time ago, names were different back then. And that particular village was on a lake, and every month they'd send out a symbolic canoe with little crafty things and whatever else they thought the spirits of the lake would like, so the spirits would like them and let them keep living there, and so on."
Twilight mulled this over. "Were there any actual spirits in the lake?"
Discord made a careless gesture. "Maybe, maybe not. A siren or naiad or something, I don't know. What matters is they believed it, so there was a canoe each month, maybe on the full moon or something equally charming, and the spring ones were full of fruit and crops and such, so: May Canoe. It's not like 'Twilight Sparkle' makes all that much more sense. Can I get on with the important information now?"
"Um, yes, sorry," Twilight said. She teleported a notebook and quill to herself and scribbled down what Discord had already said.
"Thank you. So May Canoe was doing, frankly, ridiculously well, and the disease rate in his village went to practically nothing. My aunt, as you can imagine, was not pleased. She threw an absolute fit. Really, some people are just so melodramatic," Discord said without any trace of irony. "And she wanted revenge. She wanted to discredit May so that nopony would listen to him ever again, and she wanted him personally to suffer."
"How do you know all this?" Twilight asked, still writing.
Discord gave her a dry look. "Who do you think had to listen to all her rants about it?"
Twilight looked up. "Oh. Yeah, okay. So what did she do?"
"Well, you have to understand, before this she hadn't really gone out of her way to spread plague or anything like that. Sure, she'd travel between villages to infect ponies if she thought that would help--" He caught Twilight's expression. "--er, for a given definition of help -- but she just worked with what was already there. Much less effort that way. For May, though, she really wanted to leave her mark. She wanted to humiliate him. She designed her own disease for the first time, a sort of 'super-cold' that took all those symptoms that were at most vaguely annoying and turned them into something deadly. A pony's throat would be so sore they couldn't even whisper. They'd have a fever so high they were delirious. Their nose would run until they drowned in their own mucus. Their--"
Twilight held up a hoof. "I get it," she said, a bit queasily. "It's the cold to end all colds."
Discord considered this. "Well, for that particular pony, yes. Very infectious. Of course, this took some time. She had to cultivate the disease, grow it in... little tide pools, almost. Little warm pockets with everything a bacterium could ever want."
"Like prehistoric petri dishes," Twilight said. She was so focused on writing she didn't noticed Discord's lips twitch as he tried to keep a straight face.
"Yes, exactly like that. Once she'd perfected it, she poisoned the lake with it. The fish, the water, even the mud was chock full of these microbes. There was no way anyone in May's village could avoid getting sick."
"So what happened?" Twilight asked reluctantly.
"What do you think happened?" Discord said. "They all got sick. A lot of them died. And then I showed up."
Twilight looked up sharply. "You -- what?"
"Oh, don't look so shocked," Discord sneered. "If that cold had gotten out into the general population, there wouldn't be any ponies left to play with. I disguised myself as a wise old unicorn and told them what was going on and who was behind it. I said I could change the sickness so every second pony would survive it, and I'd tell them how things like vaccines worked, but I warned them if I did that, Quiet Author would know, and diseases from then on would be a lot less lenient. The worst anyone dealt with back then was a few days in bed."
"So they'd have more tools to fight her, but she would make them need those tools," Twilight said. "And they agreed?"
"After a while. They argued. Eventually one night May came to me and took the deal without asking anyone else. I kept up my end of the bargain. Every other pony in that village lived, including May, and he went on to invent vaccines for that disease and a few others. He was hailed as a hero. They even wrote songs about him." Discord managed to keep his glee down to a tight smirk. "Would you like to hear part of one?"
Twilight stared up at him, eyes shining. A contemporary secondary source for what had to be a momentous historical event? "Please!" She readied her quill once more.
"All right." Discord took a (remarkably steady) breath and let his voice become a lilt. Twilight would only have heard the laughter shaking it if she'd been listening for it. "May Canoe fends off petri cold, once he's ill for Auntie Author's goal."
Twilight frowned at her paper. "Why does that sound... familiar...?" She knew that tune, didn't she? But where had she heard it before? And why was it Sweetie Belle's voice she could imagine humming it, almost like it was a... Filly Guide... song....
Slowly, she dragged her gaze up to Discord, who was waiting with a mischievous grin and bated breath.
Then it clicked.
"DISCORD!"
Applejack and Big Macintosh both raised their heads as a faint shriek echoed from the other side of Ponyville. The sounds of various crashes and hysterical laughter soon followed.
"Must be Saturday," Applejack said.
"Eeyup."
A small explosion burst from one of the branches of Twilight's castle, barely visible from Sweet Apple Acres. A greyish blur fled from the smoke, a purple speck in hot pursuit.
"DISCORD! I'M TELLING CELESTIA!"
Applejack shaded her eyes. "She seems like she has it handled."
"Eeyup."