The portal back to the arcade approached at terrifying speed, and Twilight instinctively tried to cover her face to avoid the pain of smashing through it. Of course, there was nothing to smash through, the glass covering that would in other circumstances have blocked the arcade cabinet was just an illusion here, and she passed easily through the area that the window wasn’t, ejected from the world of the game and sent tumbling onto her hands and knees in the arcade’s main room.
The machines seemed quieter, whether it was some sort of trick and advantage Discord was giving himself and using that to disorient her, or just a result of her body reacting to how badly it had been beaten in the machines and not being able to hear as well. Whichever it was, she clutched her head as the agony pumped through it, the stars and planets on the arcade’s thin carpet seeming to swirl in front of her.
“Have I made my point perfectly clear to you, Twilight?” Discord taunted her, raising his foot and stepping down on the back of her head, pressing her cheek to the rough carpet, and grinding it into the ground. She shook in growing pain, the rough carpet scratching up her cheek, the glow-in-the-dark stars seeming to shine in her eyes as Discord pressed her down on the ground, into her own tears, “Are you ready to give in and accept your superior, or are you still under the impression that you could ever stand up to me?”
It wasn’t exactly a kind question, and she didn’t know what would happen if she said yes, but she couldn’t bare to find out. She knew he had control, she wasn’t beating him like this, and while her body and instinct screamed at her to surrender, she was sure she couldn’t just let him do whatever he wanted. She couldn’t even remember why at this point, what he had done that brought her to this, but she knew that it would be too dangerous to let him go, he was too powerful, and she had to find a way to defeat him. Tears continued to roll down her cheeks as she fought to focus on the situation at hand, fought to remember what was happening to drive her towards this. In the end, there was nothing to draw on for strength except her conviction that she would have to find victory. Based on that and nothing else, that knowledge she had to win, she pushed forward, and wrapped her arms around Discord’s knees, pulling back to trip him flat on his back. For once, she accomplished something, at least, sending Discord tumbling back, onto the ground in front of her.
Or rather, TOWARDS the ground. He didn’t land. Instead, he tumbled away, hands flailing as he sunk into the space-patterned floor. She reached out towards him as he fell, trying to get her hand back on his foot, only to find that she couldn’t touch him. He was out of her reach... And more importantly, of course, she had somehow reached into the ground.
Twilight watched him tumble away from her, fading into a strange tiny dot far away, and made an instinctive grab at him again as if it would help. It didn’t, he’d become a star in the distance. She tried to rise up to her feet, look for another option in the arcade, but her legs couldn’t find the floor. She wasn’t on her hands and knees now, and she looked behind her to see she wasn’t in the arcade, either. Instead, the pattern of the floor was all around her. As she started to flail around in desperation, trying to grab something to hold onto, she realized she had gone from staring at an image of outer space, to floating helplessly in the inky blackness on her own, without even something she could grasp that would help her maneuver. She was alone, and she started to shiver, her aching muscles quaking as she started to worry this was the end, that Discord was going to leave her floating helplessly here and return to whatever nefarious plans he had.
Of course, Discord wasn’t the sort to let his opponents languish alone, he wanted their defeat to be total and undeniable, and soon, Twilight his deep, mocking voice. When she turned, she saw that the Draconequus was wearing a bulky white suit with a great fishbowl-like helmet on top.
“Oh dear, fancy seeing you here,” he gave a deep, cruel chuckle, “Are we having fun yet? I know I am, I do LOVE exploration, deep space, monsters, alien encounters, starships...” His spacesuit turned black, with a small red triangle, and a human with close-cropped black hair stood in front of her, “But you see, Picard, in the end, all you humans are is snivelling ants giving pointless lectures about morali-Oh, wait, no, that’s my 12:30. You’re the stupid pony. I’m sorry, you four-dimensional life-forms all look the same to me. Where was I...”
The smile on the human’s face grew wider as he morphed back into the spacesuit-wearing draconequus, watching her wickedly and with no small look of cruel anticipation in his eyes, “Ohh, yes, my dear little Twilight, how exciting... Surely any smart filly wants to go to space and have all those adventures, study stars and planets... But you know, I’m SURE that I’m missing something. Or maybe...” he considered, “Or maybe YOU’RE the one who’s missing something... Is there something you’re missing, Twilight? Or maybe something that’s missing around you?”
Twilight listened for a moment, not entirely sure of what the Draconequus was getting at, “I don’t think I’m missing anything, Discord. And I doubt anything’s missing around me, either. In fact, that’s highly unlikely, because since outer space is a vacuum a-” She tried to continue, but found herself unable to speak. She started to gasp for air, and nothing came, and she felt a strange pressure in her body, growing agony as Discord rolled back in his suit laughing.
“Oh, right, that was it! I knew I forgot something, you can’t BREATHE in space! At least, not without a spacesuit...” He vanished from in front of her, then appeared at her side, hand on her shoulder, “Oh, don’t you HATE when you show up to the party underdressed?” She didn’t quite understand how she was even hearing him, sound shouldn’t have carried, but of course, that was the least of her problems. Twilight lashed out at him, but her hoof caught nothing, and she simply spun around in the air, eyes starting to bulge from the mismatched pressure.
“Oh, Twilight, are you alright?” Discord laughed as the purple pony tried and failed to draw oxygen in the depths of space, “You’re turning all purple!” His smile grew wider, “Here, Twilight, let me help you get to your feet...”
With that, he grabbed her, pulled his arm back like he was about to hurl a baseball, and tossed her. She couldn’t tell how fast she was moving, at first, but it must have been at a wild speed, because soon one of the dots was growing, and seconds later, she could recognize that she was hurtling towards a red-brown rocky planet.
As she got closer, she realized the danger, and put up a force-field around her body. That decision was not a moment too soon, either, as mere seconds afterward, the field was engulfed by flames as she fell into the planet’s atmosphere. She couldn’t even see the ground or rocks coming towards her anymore, her view was obscured by the fire, and despite the forcefield protecting her from the worst of the flames, the heat still penetrated, and it felt like her coat was being singed from her body. Of course like before, it was only a feeling, but like before, that made it worse, knowing that this pain was, hypothetically at least, unending. She could be put through this for years without it ending, without even getting close to damaged enough to stop.
Eventually, though, it did come to an end, even if it was hardly how she would have hoped. The falling finished, and the landing came, her body crashed into the ground, creating a massive crater on impact, then rolling along the base of it, surrounded by flames. It was hard to know which hurt more, the impact which jarred her jaw, teeth, and bones the second it happened, or the residual heat that charred her flesh, the abandonment of the force-field meaning she was finally being scorched by the heat she experienced. That might almost have been a relief, if it wasn’t accompanied by the searing agony of flames and the rocks and pebbles tearing at her skin as she rolled across the ground.
She cut a new canal through the desert planet’s surface as she rolled, bouncing and twisting far beyond her own control over the agonizingly rough surface of the planet. She didn’t know how long she was rolling and bouncing, but when she stopped rolling and looked back behind her, the score her helpless body carved in the ground stretched to the horizon. Twilight clutched her head, feeling it throbbing and heavily scratched, before looking around herself to see where she was and how she had wound up here.
She looked up from her position on her hands and knees, only to find that she had come to rest at the foot of some strange, monstrous being that looked like a cross between a rock quarry and a dragon. She tried to stand up to flee, but found herself unable to move, her muscles tense and body starting to shake in fear of the beast she had rolled to a stop in front of. The creature rose up higher, until it stood at nearly eighty feet tall, or even more, standing at its full height and arching its back before letting out a monstrous roar that shook the ground around Twilight, and send a chill of fear to her bones. Dust that had gathered on the great beast’s shoulders began to fall around her, and she stood perfectly still, hoping that if she didn’t move then perhaps the monster would mistake her for a rock or pile of dirt, and she could be spared whatever fate awaited her.
Paralyzed by fear anyway, it wasn’t exactly hard to stand perfectly still. She tried to hold her breath to stop even the rise and fall of her chest, which a little bit in the back of her mind couldn’t help noticing the irony that she was trying to avoid breathing so soon after being nearly killed by the airless void of space. Now, of course, she couldn’t breathe at all... Or else, she might not breathe again. She couldn’t even let her eye follow the motion of the beast as it leaned down to inspect her.
The trick might have worked, too, but in her attempt to avoid the danger she had forgotten one important detail about her situation. It may LOOK like a dumb predatory beast, but it, like everything else here, was a manifestation of Discord’s sadistic desire to bully and beat her. It wasn’t real, it was an illusion made to bring her even more humiliation, and she could no more stop Discord from assaulting her with this beast than she could stop him from thinking about her.
The beast reached out, and wrapped a single, massive hand around her body, then lifted her in the air. Then it stood, back to its full height, and Twilight was left dangling in the creature’s grasp, shaking and kicking her legs in the last, desperate attempts to escape the monster. Those attempts were doomed to failure, though, and the beast simply tossed her in the air, opened its mouth, and let her fall into it.
Though she expected a quick end after being so quickly and brutally assaulted, to disappear into the soaked cave and then down the monster’s throat, she should have known better than to expect something so simple from Discord. Or more accurately, so... Uncreative. He may have liked to come up with strange horrors for her to do battle with (or perhaps fail to do battle with, so far,) none of them would be so casual as to eat her. Instead, she found herself lying on a thick, wet, red carpet in a dripping cavern that she realized, from the bright white stones around her, was the beast’s mouth.
She didn’t bother to speak this time, she knew something strange was coming, and she wasn’t disappointed. One by one, the strange white stones rose out of the ground, like monstrous beasts. The roots of the teeth became their legs, and from the sides, giant arms grew like those of vicious, musclebound beasts. The smooth fronts shifted quickly to bare cruel, wild smiles. Twilight didn’t even have time to think about what was happening and try to understand why, she just needed a way out.
She realized a moment after that the beast may be some alien, divorced from anything she was familiar with on Equestria, but it still must have had something similar in its anatomy. That meant that most likely, she would be able to escape by backing off, and while the monster’s throat was behind her, she doubted Discord would allow her to get out of this one by simply dissolving in stomach acid. She would fall into some new trap, but that one, unlike this, might have something she could think her way out of.
With her eyes on the creatures, she wasn’t looking behind her. She didn’t realize, then, that the teeth near the back of the jaw had risen too, and performed a circling maneuver, slipping behind her to be ready when she backed into them. Her back hit something smooth, hard, and wet, and no sooner had she realized what had happened, than she was seized from behind, and her arms grabbed and pulled behind her, trapped in a full-nelson hold by the dragon-creature’s teeth.
The creature wrenched on the hold, cranking her arms back and her head down. Agony rolled through her as her muscle and neck were stretched in the being’s viciously-executed hold. She couldn’t defend herself, and her abs, chest, and whole body were completely open and vulnerable to whatever vicious assault was coming next from the tooth creatures.
As it turned out, the assault was exactly what she should have expected, as they closed the circle around her, and began their assault. The teeth may have been strange, almost cartoonish enemies, but their bodies (muscular as they seemed) were still made of rock-hard enamel. A crushing fist slammed into Twilight’s midsection, and she instinctively leaned forward as the air was driven from her body once more. While she tried to recover her breath, a second stepped forward, and added a hook punch to the cheek that rocked her head to the side, while a third delivered what would have been considered a headbutt to the opposite side, but ultimately, thanks to their bizarre neck-less anatomy, ended up as a crushing blow from a solid brick wall.
She was dazed and seeing stars, her muscles starting to go limp, as she felt a third one reach down and grasp her legs. It wrenched them, and for a moment she worried that there was something far worse than physical blows planned, but she soon found herself lifted up in the air.
Holding the helpless pony off the ground, the monsters began to carry her like a sports hero being celebrated or a crowdsurfing rockstar towards the entrance of the twisted cave. She squirmed and twisted to try to get out of them, but she was being carried in a massive swarm of the tooth-beasts, each one more eager than the last to contribute to her downfall, and there was no escape from their wicked grasp. They began to chant in some bizarre, unrecognizable language, and Twilight found herself helpless, with no choice but to close her eyes and simply hope that whatever came when she was thrown from the mouth wouldn’t be too painful.
She would have hoped that perhaps closing her eyes and not knowing what was coming would protect her from some of the agony and horror, she remembered stories of intoxicated ponies able to survive because they couldn’t process what was about to happen, and how much of the pain a pony felt in an accident or injury was more from shock than it was from actual nerves firing. Her plan to spare herself the horror, though, failed when she felt the monsters gather together and pitch her out of the beast’s mouth, sending her tumbling towards the ground below. An instinct she could only wish to control forced her to open her eyes as soon as she was hurled forward, and she had no choice but to watch, flailing and helpless, as she fell towards the ground. Like the first time, the impact was agonizing, only the cruel rules of Discord’s world saved her from being splatted like a dropped meatball on the ground, with the trade-off of overwhelming agony as her body was crushed to the rocks and sand beneath her.
Covered in saliva, dust, and her own blood from the scratches on impact, bruises rapidly forming on her body, Twilight Sparkle took a moment lying on the ground to try to recover. Far above her, she heard a screaming sound, and looked up on instinct to see one of the horrific tooth-monsters tumbling through the air towards her. She winced as it came close, instinctively ducking away, but it would prove unncessary as the huge tooth-beast landed in a heap beside her, lying limp and broken. Then, from far above, she heard the deep voice of her tormenter,
“Oh, dear,” Discord laughed, and when she looked up she saw that the monster had transformed into the draconequus, “Look at that. I lost a tooth!” His comment was followed by raucus, cruel laughter as Twilight glared up at him from far below.
“I know you’re... Ahhh!” She winced in pain as she spoke, “I know you’re having fun, Discord, but I’m not... I’m not going to give up if you’re going to just play tricks like this. So either play fair, or don’t play at all!”
“PLAY~?” Once again, she heard the distinct, mocking tone in his voice that told her she’d given the giant creature something new to focus on, “Did you say we want to play? Oh, I can play,” he chuckled, “I love to play, it’s all a matter of what I’m playing... Oooh, how about...” There was a flash, and Discord was suddenly wearing the heavy padding of a player of Appleloosan Hoofball, “How about we play some HOOFBALL!”
Suddenly, the rocky ground was transformed to a soft grass, though the blades came up above her knees as Discord backed away a few steps. She began to run from him, but was brought to a halt as another version of the giant, smaller than before but still nearly seven times her height if not more, grabbed her by the horn. She began to struggle, but she felt him push down, and stopped running to try to push up, push back against the weight of his hand to avoid being crushed.
An ear-piercing shriek sounded, rolling through the air around her and making her coat rustle in the wind, and a great noise of bodies crashing together echoed around her. She didn’t understand the rules of the game, which meant she was hopelessly unprepared for what came next. The only warning she got came in a flash, a mere moment of seeing a huge, round-toed shoe driving towards her body, before an overwhelming impact struck her and she was sent hurtling into the air.
She could scarcely even count at this point how many times the air had been driven from her lungs, and as she fought to take another breath, she watched below her as padding-clad clones of Discord battled it out in a line beneath her. She continued to sail up and over, until her body passed a huge, canary-yellow set of upright bars with a crossbar far below, and another painfully loud cheer rocked her body.
The cheer faded out, and she was hurling over another green field, though this one had sand-covered track in the shape of a diamond surrounding it. Once more, she was flying over a collection of Discords, looking a bit larger than before and now wearing the looser buttoned uniforms of Baseball players. She tumbled towards them, landing with a ‘thunk’ in one of the leather gloves, and groaning in pain from the impact. The gloves may not have had the rough, slicing feel of the rocky ground she had landed on before, but it was still far from comfortable to find herself in the hard leather. The glove closed for a moment, plunging her into darkness, and she felt herself being carried... Somewhere.
After almost a minute, just long enough for her eyes to adjust, the glove opened and the light fell on her face again. She was blinded by it for a moment, unable to see anything but the glare of the sun in her eyes, but a few seconds later, she was able to make out Discord’s face smiling down at her.
“I play Baseball too,” he chuckled, then grabbed her in one massive hand. He wrapped his fingers around her, so tight that it felt like she might be crushed, and she heard him add, “Watch out, fastball down the middle!” As soon as she heard the words, she felt a burst of incredible force as she was whipped forward, and the wind began to blow in her face so hard she felt bits of her coat flying off.
She had enough time to make out the image of another version of her tormenter rapidly approaching, clutching a heavy wooden bat, before the wind forced her eyes closed. A fraction of a second later, she felt the bat strike her body, the shaft almost as large as she was, and it was like every cell that made up her form was crushed to dust in one instant. The momentum shifted so hard that her wings were swiftly defeathered, and she was sent flying up at an angle from the blow. As she sailed away, she was able to look down and see the uniform-clad Discords watching her as she sailed up and out of their little field.... And then she began to arc downward, tumbling towards a black, concrete area surrounded by a chain-link fence. Of course, once again, a collection of Discords were present, lacking the uniforms, but a few with shirts and a few without. With her wings completely plucked by the impact from the bat, she had no way to manipulate her fall, and soon found herself clutched in both of the Draconequus’s giant hands. He squeezed her body in his claws, crushing her down, and as much as she tried to avoid it, she felt herself twisting and contorting until she resembled a large ball, a little larger than his hands, with her face staring out of a gap in her twisted-up legs into the eyes of the Draconequus.
“Then again, maybe you’re looking for something less formal,” he laughed, “It’s fine, I’m always good for a pickup game or two if you like. Shirts versus skins,” he chuckled at his little joke.
“Hey, Discord, hurry up!” One of his clones said.
“Shut up and count the shot clock if you’re so impatient!” The Discord holding her snapped back at himself, then looked back down at her with a friendly smile, “I’m sorry, Twilight, I’m just VERY impatient when I don’t get my way, I just can’t control me sometimes,” he laughed again, louder, “Then again, I suppose you can’t either!”
As the other version of Discord began to count backwards from 20, the one holding her drove her body against the ground. To what should have been surprise, but in a world run by a mad draconequus was quite frankly completely normal, Twilight felt her back smash into the ground, but then bounce right back up, only to see his hand coming back down to slap her in the face. That was bad enough, but on the next bounce, she felt herself dragged to the side and then smashed diagonally, before the Discord clutching her pounded her with his other hand and began to run. She couldn’t tell if it was ten steps and strikes or a hundred before he stopped driving her to the blacktop, but finally the blows stopped...
...Only for her to be lifted into the air in the beast’s hands. She saw the rusty orange metal rim of the basketball hoop approaching, and tried to curl tighter into the ball to avoid any pain that was coming. The draconequus gripped her in both claws as he sailed into the air, then in one great motion, twisted and drove her bodily down against and then through the hoop.
The motion may not have been quite as fast and hard as the baseball throw earlier, but it was still far from gentle, and she grunted in pain as she was smashed to the ground. Naturally, she bounced once more, high enough that her shoulder was driven into the underside of the rim, and then propelled back down. The force of the impact unfurled her from her ball, and she splatted to the ground. Which, in the only mercy she had experienced so far, had turned from the hard blacktop to a soft grass.
She shook her head, hoping that the fact she had returned to her normal body-shape was a sign that the various sports-themed tricks had ended. It would have to be soon, there was only so much that even Discord could up with when it came to tricks and toys, and he had to be running out of ideas, and hopefully, perhaps, interest in tormenting her. Then again, when Discord was in his most sadistic and twisted moods, the type that she hadn’t seen from him in a long time before... Before whatever it was that sparked this encounter happened, it could take a long time before he got bored. She could only hope he was about to make a change.
That hope would be dashed when she felt a crushing weight on her back, pressing her harder into the freshly mowed grass. Making that part worse, the weight was accompanied by what felt like piercing, painful spikes that dug into her flesh, crushing into her back. She raised her eyes and saw that the games werent over quite yet, and that Discord (and his team of other selves) were now wearing shiny shirts and shorts, and that far on the other side of the grass was a great white rectangle with netting behind it. It looked like Association Hoofball was the next dish in the great feast of torment that Discord had prepared for her. She shuddered at the thought of what might come next, bowed her head, and closed her eyes, just hoping to be over with it all.
Loud laughter echoed through the area, and Twilight shuddered again, knowing that the laughter of the draconequus rarely heralded anything she would be happy about.
“Do you see how it is, Twilight?” the nigh-omnipotent being mocked her, “Do you see how helpless you are against me, how powerless you are when you try to fight me? How little chance you have now, how little chance you have ever had, to defeat me in combat? How can a little tiny mortal pony like yourself ever HOPE to challenge one such as me? Even with all the powers of the princesses, you don’t have a prayer of defeating me. And we can continue this forever, Twilight, you can’t outlast me. I can simply freeze your mind for a while, go away, and come back when I’m ready. You won’t know how long it’s been, it could be hours and it could be years, you’ll think it was just one continuous destruction of your body and mind. If I want to, Twilight, I can do anything I want, hurt you any way I want, and you have no more of a chance of stopping me than a fallen leaf has of stopping a hurricane. And you keep insisting that I need to ‘play fair.’ Play fair? Twilight, this IS fair. If you want to stop me, you have to use everything you have, and I can use everything I have as well. The fact that, in a fair competition, I will destroy you every time doesn’t mean that I’m not fighting fair. It means you should never challenge me to begin with, not like this. You cannot defeat me in combat. Do you understand?”
For a moment, she couldn’t bring herself to answer. It wasn’t that she didn’t think he was right, at least not that she didn’t think he was right she wasn’t going to win. She wanted to fight and defeat him, of course, but she couldn’t. It was that she didn’t want to let everyone down, to subject them to... To whatever he was going to do, she could hardly even remember what it was, at this point, she just knew she couldn’t allow it, it would be too dangerous, too damaging, too... Too... Something.
She sighed, and her shoulders sagged. She did want to fight back, did want to win this, but it was clear that she wasn’t going to get what she wanted this way. Continuing to fight a battle she couldn’t win wasn’t bravery or resistance, it was stupidity. The only way she would be able to stand up to him, to fight back, would be to give up for now and find another way. With her head bowed, she finally admitted.
“Alright, Discord... You win. Do whatever you’re going to do, I can’t stop you, not right now. ”
“WOOHOOOOO!” Discord suddenly stepped off her back, the weight vanishing instantly as his attitude changed in a second, “Yes, yes! I win, I’m the best, I win, I’m the best. Woo-hoo, go Discord, go Discord, who da man? It Discord! Woooo!” His enthusiasm was so ridiculous that despite her humiliation, frustration, and fear of what might come next, she couldn’t help giggling at it. It should have been scarier than it was but somehow, evil as he was, he always knew how to draw a laugh.
“Okay, we’re done here, talk later. I wiiiiiiin~!” Discord laughed, and the other versions of himself around her gathered close to join in the dancing celebration, kicking their legs up like the dancers in Manehattan.
With a chuckle despite herself, she looked up at him and asked, “Okay, really, Discord, what now?”
“Oh, you don’t know?” Discord asked, “You don’t... Remember? Come on, Twilight, you know the answer to this. Think about it, Twilight, think about what I did that lead up to this, think about when I took over. What happened?”
“Yes, you turned us grey and rever...” She stopped, “Wait... That... That was the first time, wasn’t it?” She thougth for a moment, “You did... I mean... You...” What was it? It wasn’t the reversed elements, the greying out, was it... No, no, that was another time as well. After a few more seconds, she looked up at the Draconequus, “I don’t... I don’t remember? Why am I here? What DID I do? What’s happening?”
Discord laughed once more, then reached down and stroked her hair like he was petting a puppy, “Twilight, I didn’t DO anything. This was your idea. You said that you needed to be able to protect Equestria from anything, including me. You asked me to make you forget what had happened and think I had betrayed you so you would be able to bring yourself to fight me with all you had. I didn’t DO anything, Twilight, except take some time to humiliate you when you asked. And quite frankly, I understand that many mares are into that, you didn’t need to make up an excuse you know.”
“I wasn’t-” Twilight started to object to the insinuation, “Wait... It was... It was what?”
“It was you needing to know you could protect Equestria. And you can. But not from me. Not like this.”
“Then what can I do?” She asked softly, “If I can’t defeat you?”
“You can trust me, Twilight. You won’t have to.”
She nodded, and looked down, “I guess... Even I can’t be ready for every eventuality, can I?”
“No, you can’t,” Discord shrugged, “There’s always someone out there you can’t fight. It’s not unfair, it’s just true. Even for a princess.”
“Thank you, Discord,” Twilight smiled, “I think I needed that,” she stood, and began to walk away.
“Twilight?” Discord blinked, “Where do you think you’re going?”
She paused, “Where, uh... Where IS the way out of here, anyway?”
Discord laughed, “I don’t know...” And a pair of boxing gloves appeared on his hands, and then on her hooves, “Why don’t you make me tell you? I promise, no tricks.”
Twilight looked down, “You seriously want me to fight you?”
“Well,” Discord shrugged, “It’s not ONLY mares who have fun with this. Let’s go!”
And they did.