“Well, that isn’t good.”
Buzzsaw and Laserbeak peeked down through a tiny crack in an otherwise overcast sky at the crater which had once been Canterlot Castle’s hedge maze. At the center of the crater stood five bickering ponies and one bizarre creature who, Buzzsaw thought, would have been right at home among the Terrorcons, except that he smiled and laughed far too much. Come to think of it, he mused, smiling and laughing at all would probably disqualify anyone from joining the Terrorcons except maybe as lunch…
In any case, from what the two Decepticon spies had overheard, the bizarre creature had apparently just defeated Twilight Sparkle and her little friends. Indeed, the pink clouds were rolling in from all sides beneath them, and they could hear the sound of chocolate rain striking the ground below.
“Ooooh, Lord Megatron certainly will not like this,” Laserbeak agreed. “But I’m sure he’ll come up with a plan!”
“I certainly hope so,” Buzzsaw agreed. “But he needs to know what’s happened in order to make a plan. Get going and tell him everything we saw. There’s not a minute to spare!”
“Oh, I’m sure you could spare a minute for little old me…”
There came a brilliant flash of light, and the owner of the new voice hovered there next to the two griffons on their cloudbank. Laserbeak squawked, jumping with shock and almost falling off the cloud and into the mass of floating cotton candy below.
Buzzsaw overcame his own shock first. “What are you waiting for?” he barked. “Fly, you fool!”
“Oh, I don’t think either of you are going anywhere.” The monstrosity raised a lion’s paw and somehow snapped its fingers, and ropes flashed into being around Buzzsaw and Laserbeak, binding limbs and wings together into complete immobility. “Not until dear Uncle Discord has a chance to get to know you.”
Buzzsaw made one spasmodic effort to break the ropes, but he’d already expected to fail, and he wasn’t surprised when he did. “Do what you will with us,” he said, “but no matter what, we won’t talk!”
“That’s right!” Laserbeak squawked. “We are eternally loyal to Lord Megatron, yes! Laserbeak would die for Lord Megatron! Remaining silent for Lord Megatron is so easy by comparison, yes! Compared to the many other things Laserbeak would do for Lord Megatron, not talking is so much simpler! Why, I could spend all day not talking even if Lord Megatron were not involved, but since he is, then Laserbeak will not talk twice as hard! No one is better at not talking than-“
With another little flash of light, a bandanna appeared and wrapped itself around Laserbeak’s beak, clamping it shut. “I think you two not talking is an excellent idea,” Discord purred, his smile now completely gone. “Especially not you.”
Laserbeak continued to grunt and whine through his clamped-shut beak. The gag might muffle him, but it didn’t stop him.
“Now, let’s have a good look at you two,” Discord said. “The last time I was here, that killjoy Celestia had run all the griffons out of her little ponies’ territory. And it doesn’t look like things have changed that much, so…” His red eyes with yellow sclera rippled, producing swirls of red and yellow that, somehow, captivated Buzzsaw’s gaze. “… let’s have a close look…”
Buzzsaw blinked, and for some reason his head hurt. What had just happened? He had a vague sense of time having passed, but how much? He wanted to rub his head, but his talons were still bound by that rope. And the monster was still there, laughing at him.
“Oh, ho ho ho!” Discord chortled. “Interdimensional tresspassers! How delightful! Why, your mere presence in this reality probably sped up my release by a good two years!” He lunged in more closely, his fanged face bare millimeters from Buzzsaw’s beak. “So how’s the new body? You know everything that crosses the boundary gets adapted to fit in here.” He waved a clawed hand similar to Buzzsaw’s own and added, “Of course, you weren’t lucky enough to get such a wondrous form as mine.”
Buzzsaw, unlike Laserbeak, could keep from making noise when he wanted to. He just stared back at Discord, refusing to flinch.
“Ah,” Discord said, “not a fan of the old mix-and-match, are we? I suppose you prefer things nicely sorted out.” With a toothy grin he raised his lion’s paw hand again and said, “Well, just as a welcoming gift, I’ll straighten that out for you.”
The claws snapped, and there was a flash of light.
The ropes were gone! Buzzsaw stretched his back, his four paws digging into the soil beneath him. It felt so good to be free again.
Next to him there was a buzzard of some kind. For some reason it felt familiar, especially the black head. It kept squawking and flapping its wings, dancing from one foot to the other on the ground, while that strange creature floated in the air and laughed and laughed.
“Oh, no need to thank me!” he said. “It was my pleasure, I’m sure!” With more cruel laughter, it vanished in a flash of light, leaving just Buzzsaw, the buzzard, and the overcast sky above.
For a moment Buzzsaw felt like he was forgetting something, something important. He almost had it, and then it flittered away on a wave of drowsiness. Whatever it was, it could wait; right now he felt like a nap.
He pawed the dirt, carefully settled himself down, first by the haunches, then onto his side. He curled himself up, swishing tail just in front of his nose, and closed his eyes.
Not even the frantic squawking of that annoying buzzard kept him from falling asleep.
“Hey, Thundercracker,” Skywarp said as the two pegasi soared high over Ponyville. “I been thinkin’. Suppose we do see somethin’ weird. What the slag do we do about it?”
Thundercracker had been thinking the exact same thing, but he knew better than to say anything out loud about it. “We report it to Megatron,” he said simply. “And then he decides what we do about it.”
“Yeah, but what’s Megatron gonna do about pink candy clouds?” Skywarp asked. “I mean, he’s the big boss bot, obviously, but he ain’t Primus reborn or nothin’ like that. What’s he gonna do, stand and shout at the clouds until they go away?”
“More likely he’ll shout at you,” Thundercracker said. “Then he’ll grab you by the throat, give you a little squeeze to show he cares, and then throw you at the clouds, just because.”
“Hey, why would he do that?” Skywarp asked. “I’m a loyal Decepticon warrior! I’m one of his best fighters!”
“Yeah, and you’ve got a mouth that could swallow a red giant,” Thundercracker said. “And you don’t know when to shut it. So just keep your optics peeled, and if we see something, we-“
Night fell with an audible thud, leaving the two transmogrified Seekers in absolute darkness.
“Skywarp?” Thundercracker asked, immediately bringing himself to a hover. “Skywarp, where are you?”
Silence.
“Skywarp, this isn’t funny, now where are you?”
More silence.
“So not only are you too dumb to know when to shut up,” Thundercracker muttered, “you’re too dumb to know when not to shut up, too.”
“No I’m not,” Skywarp snapped. A marginally less black part of the blackness moved a bit.
“Thought that’d do it,” Thundercracker said, carefully not making his breath of relief audible. “I’d call this just the kind of weirdness we should report to Megatron, right?”
“Yeah. Just one question, bright bot,” Skywarp said. “How do we see to even find Megatron?”
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” a third voice cooed in a tone that both former robots found all too familiar, even if the particular voice was a stranger. That tone of voice had been used by superior officers all too many times just before giving orders that even they, never the fastest processors in the mainframe, knew were sparking insane. “I’ll fix that for you in a jiffy.”
A trio of little flames ignited in front of them, and they blinked at the sight of an antique candelabra held by a bizarre serpentine mish-mash of all sorts of organics. His mismatched wings were far too small to lift it by any sane system of aerodynamics, but the five hundred or so feet separating the three of them from the ground below didn’t seem to disturb him in the least.
“And what do we have here?” the thing asked, swirling around the two of them like a flying serpent. “More extradimensional interlopers! But you were turned into ponies instead of griffons! How curious! How intriguing!” The creature’s smile became a frown instantly. “How BORING.”
“Oh yeah?” Skywarp snapped. “How’s this for boring?” For the briefest instant a flash of light drove back the unnatural night, and then it snapped back, with Skywarp nowhere in it.
“Oh, well well well!” the creature chortled, smiling again. “A pegasus with a magic trick! That’s totally different! It’s been a while since I’ve seen anything like that!” He shrugged and added, “But I spent over a thousand years as a statue, so I haven’t seen much recently except topiary and pigeons.” He raised his right hand, which kind of looked like one of Ravage’s paws to Thundercracker, and made a finger-snapping gesture.
Light flashed again, and Skywarp hovered in front of them once more. “Wha-hey!” he shouted. “How’d I end up back here??”
“Oh, don’t ask silly questions like ‘how’,” the creature said. “Just live in the moment. After all, aren’t we having a fun time, getting to know one another?”
“’Cracker, why didn’t you run?” Skywarp snapped.
“You said it yourself,” Thundercracker said. “Where am I going to run to? I can’t see anything any more than you can!”
“Oh, that’s right!” the creature said. “I did promise I’d take care of that! Discord, you silly old draconequus, you’d lose your own head if it wasn’t tied on.” At that quip his head inflated into a sphere, floating slowly away until brought up short by a cotton twine tether.
“Warp out again,” Thundercracker continued. “One of us has gotta get to Megatron!”
“I’ve been tryin’,” Skywarp said, throwing his forehooves up in frustration. “Whatever he did to bring me back took my warp function offline.”
“Well, of course,” Discord said. “I’d hate for you to run off too soon.” He tapped his chin and thought, “I could turn you into lamps, or maybe fireflies… yes, fireflies made out of real fire! That’d get the locals excited to see me, especially with all those thatched-“ His eyes went wide. “Oh, no, wait! I’ve got it!” He grinned wickedly, baring all his teeth from his single mismatched fang back to the corners of his mouth. “Yes, that’s perfect! Oh ho ho! So appropriate!”
Thundercracker couldn’t take it anymore. “What are you talking about?”
Discord tapped his temple, and his red-and-yellow eyes turned into lines of analog-transmission static. “Well, you two are from another dimension,” he said. “An alternate reality, a sort of parallel to this one. But every world has millions of nearly identical probabilities, so all I need to do is reach into phase space…” With his left clawed hand he opened up a warp portal whose top looked a lot like a square-root symbol. “… and pull out an alternate you that solves my problem.”
He stuck his lion-paw hand into the portal, rummaged around a moment, and pulled out two tiny specks of light. “And here we are!” he shouted triumphantly, and then with a flick of his thumb he shot the sparks like marbles at Skywarp and Thundercracker.
There was a horrible moment in which Thundercracker felt something more fundamental than anything he knew existed get twisted… and then turned inside out.
Then the night parted under the glow of Thundercracker’s fur.
Apparently some alternate Thundercracker, instead of being happy with blue and white, had seen the entire color palette of pony-kind and decided he had to have them all, spattered across his body so that any two colors that touched clashed so hard that photons fled in disgust.
“Oh, my goodness!” That was Skywarp’s voice… and yet some half-remembered thought told Thundercracker that the sincere concern for his well-being did not belong in that voice. “What did he do to you, Thundercracker?”
“Do to me?” Thundercracker asked. “I feel just fine. What happened to you?”
“What? You mean besides my missing the final chapter of Wither’s Heights?” Skywarp sighed. “I’m as well as I’ve ever been. But you looked dizzy for a moment. Did your organic gyroscope substitutes fail on you?” With a little smirk he added, “Or are you being disoriented by your paint job… again?”
“Hey!!” Thundercracker shouted. “My paint job is avant-garde! I bring hope and inspiration to everyone under the yoke of tyranny!” A little guiltily he added, “It’s not my fault nobody else has my color sense.”
Discord curled up laughing and laughing. “Oh, yes, yes!!” he shouted. “Exactly as chaotic as I’d hoped!” Recovering slightly, he added, “Now I have a lot of things to do, chaos to spread, you know how it is, but I’ll be back to have a closer look at you and your friends very soon!”
In a flash of light he vanished, leaving the two Seekers in a bubble of light created by the visible electromagnetic spectrum going to civil war on Thundercracker’s fur.
“Well, if you’re all right,” Skywarp said, “what are we even doing out here? It must have been important, but I can’t remember.”
“I don’t know either,” Thundercracker said. “Maybe we were going to go find some poor ground-bound pony and give them the joy of high-speed flight?”
“Oh, that again?” Skywarp shook his head. “Your fuel pump’s in the right place, Thundercracker, but those poor souls never appreciate it, you know.”
“That’s because I kept doing it wrong,” Thundercracker said. “But this time I’m going to ask nicely first.”
Skywarp nodded sagely. “That should do it,” he agreed cheerfully. “Let’s go test it out so I can get back to my books. Romance and drama are too important to put off, you know.”
“What’s goin’ on out there, Soundwave?” Frenzy found himself huddled as close to the floor lamp in Soundwave’s workshop as he could get without knocking something over. The light didn’t even extend to the end of the room before getting swallowed up by the darkness. “Not that I’m scared or nothin’. I just don’t like not bein’ able to see what I punch.”
Ravage yowled agreement from the darkness in the corner of the room. He’d given up walking on his stilt-tall legs. Now he stayed curled up on himself, waiting and hoping for the insanity to be over.
Soundwave and Rumble looked out the windows into the pitch-black streets of Ponyville. Soundwave had pushed his red goggles up over his horn; in this darkness his defective eyes actually worked a bit better than in the light. “discrepancies in reality,” he said. “inexplicable phenomena: unable to comprehend.”
“I think I saw a bunch of ponies go past down the street,” Rumble said. “Looked like they were ridin’ an express conveyor field. Or like… what’s that thing the humans do? Ice skatin’?”
Then, just as suddenly as it had come, the darkness departed, replaced by brilliant early afternoon sunlight. Soundwave stifled a grunt of pain, squinting his sensitive eyes shut until he could get his glasses back in place.
“Oh, thank the Allspark that’s over!” Frenzy blurted, not caring who heard it. “I’m gonna go get Megatron! He’ll get us out of this!”
As Frenzy bolted for the back door, Soundwave shouted, “stop at once! departure: not recommended!”
Frenzy paid no attention, swiping at the door latch and throwing the door open without breaking stride. An instant later his forehooves scrabbled for that same door latch, grabbing on with all his earth-foal strength as his rear legs left the ground and swung out over empty air. He reached the apex of the swing, fell back like a pendulum, and swung into the shop, slamming the door back shut behind him. “The ground,” he gasped. “Some slag’s taken all the ground away!!”
“Yeah, we noticed,” Rumble said, not turning his eyes away from the windows. “About half the houses in town are floatin’ in air like hoverbarges. It’d kinda be like home, except for the part where we can’t fly anymore.”
“Yeah. I noticed that.” Frenzy managed to unwrap his hooves from the doorlatch. “I hate bein’ an organic. Hate it, hate it, hate it!”
“Oh, isn’t that so sad?” A flash of brilliant light lit up the room, and Discord appeared, wearing a pair of white pants and a plaid shirt with a pocket protector and a couple of pens in the breast pocket. “Trapped in a body that isn’t yours? Oh, I do SO know how that feels!” In another flash of light, the strange clothes disappeared, and a chaise-longue burst into being under Frenzy, the little red pony bouncing up on its springs. “Lie back and tell Dr. Discord all about it.”
“Who the slag are-“
“frenzy; rumble: silence,” Soundwave said. “hostility detected; do not engage.”
“Hostility? Hostility?” Discord put on a look of exaggerated despair. “Oh, you wound me, my dear alien, you truly wound me.” A large dagger appeared in the creature’s chest, but when Discord pulled it out it made a suction-cup sound, and when he tossed it aside it bounced like rubber before it vanished. “And just when I was going to turn you back into your proper forms, too.”
“Our what??” Rumble asked. “You mean you can-“
“Of course I can,” Discord said. “Can and will!” He snapped his fingers, and a burst of light flooded the vision of the three Decepticons.
A blue cassette player and three loose cassettes clattered to the floor.
“There! Now isn’t that so much better?” Discord cooed. “Now you match the surroundings! What better place for electronics than an electronics shop?”
One of the switches on the cassette player clicked on its own. A burst of music rattled from its miniature speaker, along with a baritone voice singing, “Caught in a trap-“ A burst of static, and then the music changed, along with the singers. “Can’t help myself-“ they sang, and then the switch clicked itself off again.
“Well, yes,” Discord admitted. “It’s not really that chaotic, if I’m honest with myself. Not my best work. But when you can’t get chaos, you have to settle for irony.”
With a few chuckles, building up to loud diabolic laughter, the creature vanished, leaving the player and the cassettes to lie on the floor, helpless, inanimate, but still fully conscious of what had just happened.
“Why has nobody reported in?”
Megatron paced the floor of the guardhouse’s assembly hall. Occasional drops of chocolate milk dripped down from the ceiling, in exactly the same way the rain never did. “I thought I made my orders crystal clear,” he snarled. “Report anything strange to me! Well, I can’t count all the strange things going on outside! So where are my loyal Decepticons??”
Starscream continued paging through the half-dozen history books he’d taken from Twilight Sparkle’s library. “At a guess, this Discord creature got to them first,” he said. “The pony records are maddeningly vague, but they all agree on one point. Discord was absolutely unstoppable before the princesses used the Elements of Harmony on him.”
“I don’t like that at all,” Megatron hissed. “I don’t like being defenseless except for whatever Twilight Sparkle and her friends might do.”
“It does explain why they took the express train to Canterlot,” Starscream said.
“Yes,” Megatron agreed. “But that merely proves my point. If this Discord is at all intelligent, the first thing he will do is find a way to make sure the Elements can’t be used against him a second time.” Peeking through the window shutters at the world outside, he added, “And judging by the pink clouds, the floating buildings, the streets paved with soap, and the ballet-dancing buffalo, I strongly suspect he has already succeeded.”
“Only suspect?” The guardhouse’s front door stayed perfectly still, but the wall next to it swung up to allow Discord to walk in. As the wall slammed back down behind him, he added, “You underestimate me, my dear Megatron.”
Megatron tensed, shifting his hooves for perfect balance. “And how do you know my name?” he asked.
“Oh, it’s on everybody’s lips, isn’t it?” Discord said. He held up a sock puppet made to look like Laserbeak’s head. “We are loyal to Lord Megatron, yes!” he said in a passable imitation of the griffon’s voice. Another sock puppet, this one vaguely resembling Thundercracker down to the buzz cut mane, popped up. “One of us has gotta get to Megatron!” A third sock puppet, somehow, rose up, with a little red pony face. “I’m gonna go get Megatron! He’ll get us out of this!”
“My Decepticons,” Megatron hissed, and then the hiss became a roar. “What have you done with my Decepticons??”
“Who, me? I’ve just had a little fun!” Discord grinned, tossing the sock puppets away. “And we’re going to continue to have fun, now that the Elements of Harmony are just vaguely marketable costume jewelry!”
Megatron took a step forwards. “And how did you accomplish that?” he asked.
“Oh, that was simple,” Discord gloated. “All I had to do was reverse the polarity of a few ponies’ personalities. You know, make them the exact opposite of what they were. It’s surprisingly easy.” In an instant Discord had an arm wrapped around Megatron’s shoulders, and the burly unicorn had no idea how he’d gotten there. “In fact, most of them helped me do it to them. It’s so easy to twist a pony mind, especially when they’re brittle.”
“You shall not find me so easily turned,” Megatron growled, shrugging his shoulders and knocking Discord’s arm away.
“Oh, really?” Discord asked. “Well, I think you’re in for a surprise.” He held out a single claw of his bird-foot hand and, with a clicking noise like a switch, pushed down on the tip of Megatron’s horn…
For all his power, Discord was no god. He was not omnipotent nor omniscient. He could look across dimensions if he so chose, but a universe is a very large place even if you know what you’re looking for. And, more to the point, the Lord of Chaos, being incapable of empathy, had absolutely no ability to see inside the minds of his victims, even while he was twisting those minds for his amusement.
If he had been able to see inside the mind of Megatron, he would have seen truths that even Megatron refused to admit.
Chief among them was this: Megatron, at his core, was a coward.
Not in any physical sense, of course. Megatron reveled in combat. For all his skills as a plotter, a deceiver and a tactician, he was still most at home in one-on-one combat, to the point that he often sought it out even when the smarter play was to avoid battle and let his warriors do all the fighting. He felt in control when in battle, as he seldom did out of it.
But this physical courage rose out of fear and hatred. Megatron feared others- practically any others, but the more different from himself the more he feared them. He especially feared anyone with power, because he expected that power to be used on him as he would use it on others- that is, as a tyrant. And so his entire existence had been a battle to gain power, and to eventually be the only being possessing power, because only then, with all those he hated and feared crushed under his heel, would he be safe.
For that same reason he made a career of plots, deception, lies and intrigue. He broke promises without a moment’s thought because his enemies didn’t deserve trust, and to Megatron everyone not under his control was the enemy. He chased scheme after scheme that promised absolute victory, ignoring the insane risks of some of the plans, blinded by the illusion of battles that could not be lost. And, of course, when those schemes failed he fled the battlefield, even when his side might still have pulled out a victory, because in the depths of his mind failure meant death or enslavement- because that was what he would do with the situation reversed.
These were Megatron’s weaknesses, and also his strengths. His particular form of cowardice and self-deception, plus his innate advantages, had made his entire career as a tyrant possible.
Discord knew none of this, and his chaos magic reversed this core aspect of Megatron’s personality. Fear of the other flipped to love. Self-preservation became self-sacrifice. And Megatron’s cautious plotting nature submerged under an instinctual need to react immediately against evil, even without a plan, even without a hope, risking everything merely for a chance, no matter how slender, to save others.
In short, if you reverse Megatron, you get Optimus Prime.
And, because Discord could not read minds, the powerful uppercut he took to the jaw took him totally by surprise.
Discord rubbed his chin, looking surprisingly distraught. “You… you hit me,” he said slowly, as if the mere idea was too unthinkable for words.
“Undo what you have done to these ponies,” Megatron said, “or there’s more where that came from.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Discord said, not even the slightest hint of amusement remaining in his voice. “You got in one good shot, I’ll admit that, but one is all you get!”
Megatron launched himself at Discord again, swinging wildly with left and right forehooves, then lowering his horn and letting off a blast of brilliant yellow light. Discord merely bent out of the way of the punches, then plucked the magic blast out of the air and took a bite from it, making loud crunching sounds as he chewed.
“You know,” the draconequus said as he dodged more punches, “I really am a very busy lord of chaos, and you’re obviously going to be no fun to play with. In fact,” he added as Megatron’s swings forced him to dodge faster, “I think you’re going to be almost as big of a pest as Celestia and Luna. So what say we put you on ice for a while until I think-“
Starscream chose that moment to leap from the vaulted ceiling of the guardhouse’s assembly hall, attempting a surprise drop-kick on the back of Discord’s head. Unfortunately, Discord blipped out of existence a millisecond before the descending hoof made contact, and the next object in the line of trajectory was Megatron’s head.
Red-furred hind hoof met steel helmet with a clang.
Starscream began hopping up and down in midair, wings flapping, both forehooves holding his kicking leg. “OOOWWWW!” he shouted.
Megatron slumped forwards, out cold.
“Ha ha!” Discord’s disembodied voice gloated. “You, on the other hand, look most entertaining!” The creature blinked back into existence in front of Starscream, pointing at him and laughing. “Oh, yes! And what will your boss say when he comes to and finds out you knocked him unconscious?”
“He’s going to ask me why I didn’t finish the job,” Starscream muttered between clenched teeth.
Discord laughed even harder. “Ha ha ha haaa!! I knew it! You’re going to be a laugh riot!” He raised his right paw. “In fact, I think I’m going to make you my new court jester! After all, every king needs a fool!”
He snapped his fingers, and light flashed… and then, with a loud sparking sound, the light fizzled.
Starscream, still clutching his injured leg, stared. “Was that supposed to do something?” he asked.
“Well, that’s never happened before,” Discord muttered, more to himself than to Starscream. He reached over and gave the pegasus’s forehead a poke just below the hairline.
Starscream’s vision swirled for half a moment, then snapped back into place. “Cut it out!”
Looking a bit more determined, Discord poked him again.
This time Starscream’s vision barely flickered. “I said cut it out!” he shouted, finally letting go of his leg to swipe away Discord’s claw.
“Well, that’s curious,” Discord grumbled. “And disturbing. I’ve never seen anyone before who’s immune to my chaos magic.”
Starscream blinked. “What, really?”
Discord snapped his fingers again, and a large, dripping pink cloud materialized directly over Starscream’s head. It fell with a wet squelch, encasing him in extremely uncomfortable stickiness. “Of course, just because I can’t play with you directly doesn’t mean I can’t play with you,” he added smugly. “This should keep you out of trouble until I have time to visit you again.”
Inside the pile of cocoa-soaked cotton candy, Starscream shouted incoherently, thrashing vainly to get out.
“And now, dear aliens, adieu!” Discord smiled, floating up into the center of the guardhouse. “I would play longer, but Twilight Sparkle and her former friends are looking for me, and I mustn’t keep them waiting! Ta ta!” With one final flash of light, the creature vanished, leaving behind an unconscious unicorn and a perturbed pegasus.
The next morning, things were back to normal, or as normal as a robot’s life could be after spending months living as an organic quadruped.
After Twilight Sparkle and her friends had returned Discord to his stone prison, all the effects of his magic had reverted instantly. One by one the Decepticons had returned to the guardhouse to report, but none of them- least of all Megatron- wanted to talk about what had happened to them. In fact, at the end of the reports, Megatron made it an explicit order: none of them were to speak of that day’s events ever again, to anyone, for any reason, on pain of pain.
This is not to say that there had been no lasting consequences…
Buzzsaw flew the last tumbled wooden toy back up onto its display shelf. Most of the mess had cleaned itself, but not all of it, and it had taken an hour to put the shop area back to rights. That had been fine by him, because it gave him time to work up his courage to go back into his workshop.
When he did, the first thing he noticed was that all the dropcloths were in place- including the one he’d yanked off the previous morning.
That… worried him. In fact, he almost fled the room. Eventually, after several minutes of working himself up to it, he managed to grab a broom and poke the carved stump with it.
No response.
Confidence only partially restored, Buzzsaw dropped the broom, grabbed the very corner of the dropcloth, and yanked it away as swiftly as he could.
Four Autobots stared back at him, immobile, none of the two facing quite the same direction, as it should have been.
Except for the straw hats.
The straw hats were still there, sitting above smiling Autobot faces. The one with an arm held his hat in a jaunty pose high over his head.
Buzzsaw sat and waited for them to sing, just one note, for over an hour.
Then he sat for another hour, trying to decide if he should get down the chisel or the matches…
“Hey, lizard.”
Spike looked up from his comic book. “The name’s Spike,” he said.
“Whatever,” Skywarp said. “I’m done with that book your boss gave to me.” He tossed the book onto the library floor in front of Spike.
“Huh,” Spike said. “The Knight and His Queen. What did you think of it?”
“Yuck! Don’t get me started!” Skywarp snapped. “There was hardly any fightin’ in it! Mostly it was two people whining about how much they wanted to get together, when all they had to do was get rid of that king guy and do what they liked! And when they finally take it on the lam, they just spend one-tenth of their time runnin’ and nine-tenths of it making sad mushy talk or shoutin’ at each other! It was th’ most disgustin’ three days I ever spent, readin’ that brick!”
“Yeah,” Spike agreed. “I thought there was too much mushy stuff and not enough swords and jousting in it, too.”
“Yeah, exactly,” Skywarp nodded. Then, glancing over both his shoulders, he leaned down to the baby dragon and whispered, “So… you got anythin’ else like that one?”
“Sir, I don’t think there’s twenty gallons of blue fur dye in the entire Everfree district,” Filthy Rich said to the pegasus on the other side of the counter. “I don’t even know if there’s that much in Canterlot. I’d have to have it shipped in from Manehattan or Fillydelphia.” He waved a hoof and added, “Besides, your legs and mane are already a very nice shade of teal. Why would you want to cover that up?”
“It’s just in case,” Thundercracker growled. “Look, I don’t want to talk about it. Just put in the order and stop asking questions, all right?”
Megatron set down the polishing rag and, for the fifteenth time that morning, looked at his reflection in his armor.
He didn’t want to think about what he’d experienced in those few moments after being… altered… by that thing up until Starscream mercifully (ha) put him out of his misery for a while. He didn’t want to… and yet the memory prodded at him like a short circuit. No matter what he did, it kept drawing attention back to itself, making it impossible to get anything done.
There had been no pleasure in that punch, that one swing of the hoof that had connected with its target. He hadn’t felt the joy of battle, the surge of confidence, the heady feeling of control. It had just been a thing that needed to be done, even if it failed, because nobody else would do anything. It had been reluctant, desperate necessity, and nothing more.
And he hadn’t done it because he’d been angry… no, strike that. He hadn’t been angry about himself. He’d been angry about his Decepticons, about the ponies of the town, about everyone else. He’d been angry on their behalf… and that had never, NEVER happened before.
That wasn’t me, he thought. That’s not how my mind works, not after ten million years. I’ve never had the least concern about my warriors, let alone total strangers or inferior life forms. And I have never found single combat distasteful, not even against pitiful fleshlings.
That is how Prime thinks. I ought to know. I’ve used it to my advantage so many times, I ought to recognize it when I see it from the other side.
But to know that somewhere in my engrams lurks the same kind of thinking as Optimus Prime…
The armor exploded across the armory floor, pieces crashing into the walls.
Revolting!!
Slowly lowering his hoof, Megatron forced himself to breathe deeply. With a flash of yellow magic he gathered the armor back together, refastened the buckles and straps that held it together, bent out the new dents.
Then, still breathing deeply, he picked up the polishing rag and began buffing the armor again…
Starscream stared at the book, not really reading the words on the page.
None of the books in Twilight Sparkle’s library had any practical information about chaos magic. So far as Starscream could tell, this Discord being was the only one who used it, and none of the pony researchers had had the slightest interest in pursuing the topic. In fact, based on the tone of the history books about Discord, ponies avoided chaos like the scraplets.
That made his frustration all the deeper. How could he explore the potential of a new-found immunity when he couldn’t possibly test it?
He wasn’t immune to magic as such. His experience with the pink pony’s engrams, and several blasts from Megatron, had proven that. But possibly that wasn’t as cut and dried as he’d thought. After all, he was immune to lightning strike, more or less. And there had been that time he’d been thrown out of the Cloudsdale weather factory tour after the series of bizarre accidents in his proximity.
Perhaps… there is something about me… that disrupts magic?
But then, how would that engram transfer have had any effect? To say nothing of the things I was able to accomplish while under their influence…
Starscream continued to think, staring at the book, his thoughts mostly circling around how to test the hypothesis without getting himself fried or turned into a frog in the process.
The potential for pain was great…
… but the potential for power, especially in this world where magic was omnipresent…
… for that, perhaps the pain would be worth it.