The storm clouds continued to rage but were now producing rain. The lightning bolts, which previously limited themselves to the clouds, occasionally struck the ground.
Fizzy examined a message timestamp. “October 2010.”
“I don’t see any airships,” Yearling said.
“Because they don’t know enough to look for us yet,” Fizzy replied. “I also don’t see anything about Ponies.”
“The very beginning?” Discord asked.
Fizzy nodded.
“Of what?” Yearling asked.
Fizzy and Discord remained silent.
TantaByte was standing off in the distance. No longer a wolf, it much more closely resembled a strange unicorn, and it was poking at some kind of kiosk.
“What’s it doing?” Caballeron asked.
“Nothing good, I’m sure,” Yearling said.
Above the kiosk, a glowing icon appeared, floating and rotating. TantaByte grabbed hold of it, and it expanded into a massive purple mallet of energy. The kiosk then melted away into the floor.
“Did it just give itself a weapon?” Yearling asked.
“I think…it’s a ban-hammer,” Fizzy said.
“How is it even smart enough to do that?” Yearling asked.
Discord glanced at Fizzy, who looked very distressed. Then she held up her gauntlet and began typing. “If it can get one, maybe I can too.”
Caballeron kept a watch on TantaByte while Fizzy was working. “It’s just sitting there.”
“Come on, come on, let me in!” Fizzy yelled. The gauntlet screen blinked, and out popped a similar icon. Fizzy grabbed hold of it and it formed into a hammer identical to TantaByte’s, only this one was blue. Fizzy turned to face the Tantabus, but it was still ignoring them. It paced like a guard on patrol.
“Why is it just wandering around?” Caballeron asked.
“It seems to be waiting for something,” Yearling said.
In a chromatic glimmer, a new message appeared. TantaByte immediately locked eyes on it and adjusted its hold on the hammer.
At once, Discord had a terrible feeling in his gut. He asked, “Is that message about Ponies?”
Fizzy swallowed hard. “I think so.” She began typing on her gauntlet and managed to bring up a list of threads on the board. She instructed it to search for any messages containing four specific words:
While the gauntlet was processing Fizzy’s request, glowing threads shot out of the first message, and more messages appeared. Those expanded further. A new tree had been born, and TantaByte was now moving towards it.
Fizzy’s gauntlet finished its task, and it confirmed her fears. The query had returned only one thread matching her search parameters, and that thread was directly in front of them. “The first Pony message thread. That’s it, that’s the one!” Fizzy rushed forward. “Go, go, go!” TantaByte accelerated into a full gallop, taking a swing at the tree with its hammer; Fizzy deflected it with her own.
Discord cast a spell that created a boombox, which filled the air with heavy orchestral hits and an ominous choir. “Music to slay by? Sure, I’ll take it,” Discord grinned.
As the two hammers continued to clash, Yearling and Caballeron attacked as well. Combined hits from the Search Bar and the Disc forced TantaByte to leap back. Discord’s next spell produced a tomato. Fine, whatever. He threw the tomato and it splattered in the face of TantaByte. TantaByte paused and stared at Discord. It opened its mouth, revealing the most terrifying maw of teeth imaginable.
“Oh, my,” Discord said.
The TantaByte leaped over the other three, wildly swinging the hammer and heading straight for Discord. “Hey, I’m not Donkey Kong!” Discord grabbed hold of his own tail and jumped away from the hammer, which struck the ground so fiercely that it left a glowing crater. Discord kept running with TantaByte in pursuit. “Can we please talk about this? Sorry about the tomato, I was hoping for a bowling ball!”
Caballeron knocked TantaByte over with a buck from the side and then thwacked it with the Search Bar. Fizzy came in with the hammer to finish it off, but TantaByte blocked the attack with its own hammer. Fizzy put all of her weight into her hammer, trying to hold TantaByte down while the other three piled on. TantaByte exploded back onto its feet, sending all four of its opponents hurtling through the air. Fizzy hit the floor hard, dropping her hammer.
Discord tried the sphere again. “Come on, ‘Magic 8-Ball,’ something good. I’m tired of rolling ‘Nat Ones’ like an inept warlock.” Out popped a moderately-oversized silver cannon. “Oh, my BFG9000! I thought I loaned that to Isabelle. Oh well!” He took aim and unleashed a glob of green plasma at TantaByte. He kept firing until the weapon’s power cell was spent. There was no sign that it had any effect. Fizzy flailed her hammer so wildly at TantaByte that Caballeron and Yearling had to keep back in order to avoid being hit. It was then that they realized it was getting bigger.
“Why is it growing?” Caballeron asked.
“I think it’s feeding. On her,” Discord said, pointing at Fizzy.
Caballeron glanced at the readout on his search bar.
The TantaByte bucked Fizzy away, spun around and struck with its hammer at the base of the tree. The tree began flickering and sounds of electrical discharges filled the air. Immediately the four adventurers and TantaByte fell to the floor in excruciating pain, their bodies distorting like video static.
“What’s…happening?” Yearling asked.
Discord looked at his claw. It was becoming translucent. “It’s…erasing us! We’re–” he winced. “Ugh, ‘Back-to-the-Futuring!’”
Fizzy was laying prone, clearly in pain. Must… stop it. She raised her gauntlet and used her admin access again.
The flickering of the tree ceased, and Fizzy jumped up and began swinging again.
Caballeron asked, “Why did hitting the tree hurt the Tantabus?”
Yearling didn’t know. She looked to Discord for an answer, but he wasn't paying attention.
He paced with worry. Fluttershy, are you alright? That didn’t hurt, did it? No, no, you’re fine. It only lasted a nanosecond, you probably didn’t even fee–
“Discord!” Yearling yelled.
He turned, shook the fears from his mind and answered, “Oh, oh, umm, of course! The Tantabus is bound to the tree too. If the tree goes, it goes.”
Yearling wondered why damage to the tree was affecting them at all, but there was no time for that. She asked Discord, “Why would the Tantabus try to delete itself?”
Discord looked at TantaByte and then at Fizzy. Fizzy’s rage blazed past the tears in her eyes as she continued to fight. Luna, I hope you knew what you were doing.
Fizzy took another swing. TantaByte leapt away, smashing a branch of the tree in mid-air. Again, Fizzy undeleted the messages. The TantaByte struck the tree again, but Fizzy kept on it. “Fizzy!” Yearling yelled.
Fizzy said frantically, “I have to keep typing! Fight it!”
Caballeron and Yearling charged in again, fighting ferociously. Yearling took a fierce kick and doubled over. For once in his very unserious life, Discord was terrified. This isn’t working. I need to– He tried another spell. Please be something. Aha!
Fizzy, you’re with me. Everycreature else… A white light shot out from Discord’s sphere in all directions. Caballeron became a statue in a menacing pose. Yearling paused in mid-air. The Tantabus was frozen. Discord lowered his sphere and breathed a sigh of relief.
In her rage, Fizzy hadn’t fully grasped what was happening. She only knew that TantaByte had stopped attacking the tree. She picked up her hammer and struck. The hammer bounced off with an iridescent flare. She tried again. And again. A mosaic of Nirik fire enveloped her as she continued.
“That won’t work!” Discord said.
“Why not?!” She turned to Discord, her tears immediately turning to steam.
“Time is suspended. Nothing can be changed.”
“What good is the spell, then?!”
“The time freeze wasn’t for the Tantabus. It was for you.” Discord walked over to Fizzy. Her breathing was quick and heavy.
“We don’t have much time, Fizzy. You need to listen to me.”
“What! What else can you say?”
“Princess Luna–”
“What did she say to you?”
Discord stopped, not wanting to break his word. He looked at the leviathan towering over them. It had clearly taken the shape of a Kirin. Looking back at Fizzy, he asked, “That’s your Tantabus, isn’t it.”
Fizzy clenched her eyes shut and nodded silently as her Nirik flames died down. Discord’s ears lowered and he let out a sigh. “I am so sorry,” he said calmly as he sat down comfortably on the ground. “Sit down. Please.” Fizzy extinguished what was left of her Nirik fire and she did as he asked.
“I know what you’re going through,” Discord said.
“Sure, the god who can do anything knows what this feels like.”
“Even if I was that powerful, do you really think– Sure, I managed to laugh and have fun, but that’s not all it was. From the moment I came into being and bent the universe to my will, I was empty.”
“Why? You could have anything you wanted.”
“No, I couldn’t. No creature liked what I did.”
“What did you expect? You were destroying everything.”
“Not destroying, I like to think of chaos as guerilla art. But I was the only one to see it that way. And what is it to be an artist whose art doesn’t speak to a single creature?”
“You… felt like you didn’t have a purpose?”
“My home was the entire multiverse, but it also wasn’t anywhere.” He looked up at the frozen storm clouds. “Wandering through infinity, I was an orphan seeking approval, but I mostly got treated like an unwanted pest by all who met me for more than a few minutes.” He looked back at Fizzy. “No creature thought anything I did or said was funny. I wanted them to laugh with me, and I couldn’t even get them to laugh at me, as if I had actualized with the cutie mark of a comedian in a world where everycreature hated jokes. So I just did whatever I wanted.” He shook his fist in the air. “Hooray for nihilism!”
“And your point is, you found your place? It’s not very reassuring when the best advice an immortal has to give is to wait a million years.”
Discord put his hands to his chest and reeled backwards like he’d been shot. “Owch, that hurt. Do I look that old?” He tugged on his goatee and examined it. “It’s the white hair, isn’t it.” Fizzy didn’t laugh, but she cracked a slight grin and shook her head. Given the circumstances, it was better than nothing. Discord continued, “You’re going to say, while you’re here of all places, that you don’t have a purpose? I can drain a lake and teach the fish to perform zero-gravity Liberati. But this place? Creatures like yourself forged it, and I barely understand any of it. I’m not the god here. You are.”
“Then we leave and I disappear again.”
“What about Trixie? Starlight? Stygian? Sunset? Princess Luna? Fizzy, you’re more than you think. When a virus appeared a couple of years ago, you harnessed the power of this world to keep Bronies together! I find it no mere coincidence that your journey has led you here, with”–he pointed to TantaByte–“another virus, this time in a computer, threatening to tear it all apart.”
Fizzy suddenly remembered the letter from Derpy. She pulled it from under her armor and opened it. Inside was one of the mystical pages. She pulled it out, hypnotized by its shimmer. Discord’s eyes lit up at the sight of it. Part of him wanted to ask for it, but not even he would consider taking a Derpy letter from its rightful owner. “You shouldn’t need to use that here. Anycreature can best their own Tantabus, and you’re already the most powerful being here. You hold all of the cards.” Fizzy silently stared at the page. Discord stood up and said firmly, “Moderator Fizzy Glitch, ban that thing.”
Fizzy sighed, and then stared at the Tantabus for a minute or so. Finally, she tucked the page back under her armor, got up, and walked over to it. Discord noted the ban hammer still laying on the ground. “You don’t want that?”
“I won’t need it,” Fizzy said with a hint of confidence in her voice.
Discord’s ears perked up slightly and his eyes grew wider as Fizzy began typing on her gauntlet. “What are you doing?” Discord asked.
“What I should have done before it went for the tree.” She yelled, “What a noob I am, giving myself top tier access just so I could stoop to its level and play Super Smash Brothers.” Fizzy let out an annoyed scream as she continued working. Import OS and vShield, include dependencies. Establish environment parameters– all right– Set varX tantaByte.virus.definition, varZ, TantaByte.object. “How long will your spell last, Discord?”
“A couple more minutes at most,” he replied. He glanced down at the sphere in his hand. It was beginning to feel heavy.
Fizzy kept working. For varX, disable read permissions, write permissions, modify, execute, folder changes, permissions for varX. If OS path isfile…OS make directory…shutil.move. Find file.path for varX, quarantine tantaByteGPT.object. Fizzy noted the close proximity of Yearling and Caballeron to the Tantabus. Get ID’s, initialize varY, and varC, set ID’s to vars, disable tantaByte’s object access. vShield, If tantaByteGPT found, quarantine.
The sphere was beginning to heat up. Discord was holding on with both hands now as its weight continued to increase. Sweat was running down his forehead. “Fizzy?”
“I know!” She typed faster until she was satisfied she had everything covered. The tree! If root contains string, “Friendship is Magic,” disable TantaByteGPT object read/write access. She gave her code a quick check for errors. file.path, not file.pat!
Steam was pouring off the sphere now and it seemed to weigh a ton. “Fizzy!” Discord yelled, his hands shaking from the searing pain.
“Compiling… 87 percent… 95… done. Close the spell!”
Fatigued, Discord dropped the sphere on the ground and tried to shake the burning sensation from his hands. He knelt down to catch his breath as time slowly began to resume.
A small translucent rotating cube floated above Fizzy’s gauntlet which was now blinking brightly:
Yes! Fizzy confirmed the command, and a glittering array of binary data streamed forth from the gauntlet as time reached normal speed. Yearling and Caballeron continued their attacks, unaware that anything had changed. Four luminous diamonds appeared on the floor around them and TantaByte, with four identical ones higher up. The diamonds linked to each other with dotted lines. Fizzy’s program detected Caballeron and Yearling within its perimeter and forced them out with an invisible gust of wind. TantaByte struck the tree with its hammer, but nothing happened. It quickly became aware of its surroundings and leaped for safety. The array of diamonds immediately became a cube with walls resembling cracked glass. Boom! TantaByte’s body bounced off the wall. It tried to attack a different one. Boom! The cube shook but held firm. Fizzy’s gauntlet bleeped.
Fizzy pressed ‘yes.’ The cube surged with orange electricity. All eight corners concentrated beams into the center, fractionating TantaByte’s body one piece at a time. The nightmare creature howled in pain and flailed desperately, but it was futile. Fizzy’s code was rock solid. More of the Tantabus vaporized as the four adventurers approached the cube and watched as it was deconstructed.
“Did we do it?” Yearling asked.
No creature responded. They simply stared.
“Come on. Just derez,” Discord thought as he watched the caged creature’s agonized thrashing. He turned to Fizzy and focused on her eyes.
Fizzy considered looking for a positive thought, but decided against it. She wanted to keep her mind blank. She turned her gaze away from the Tantabus and looked to the horizon. Don’t think. Don’t give it anything. Starve it. She was as stone-faced as one of Celestia’s royal guards, but the words the Tantabus spoke to Derpy resonated in her mind: They don’t need you. They don’t want you. It would be better for everyone if you never existed. Depression washed over Fizzy.
“No,” Discord thought.
The cube shook and shifted to a skewed angle, and TantaByte began reassembling. One corner of the cube broke, followed by another.
“Why is it coming back?” Caballeron asked.
All four adventurers stepped back.
Fizzy was panicking and now clinging to her ban hammer. TantaByte grew until it exceeded the size of its container. Fizzy’s quarantine program shattered like a mirror as TantaByte continued growing. Its hammer morphed into a scythe, and spikes protruded from its back. The beast roared so loudly that it shook the ground.
“What happened?” Yearling asked. There was no time to answer. The scythe arced down at Yearling. Years of experience was all that saved her from being sliced in half. She threw her disc. Clang! It bounced off like metal against armor. Caballeron’s Search Bar had the same result. Discord cast a spell that dropped a giant anvil on TantaByte. Nothing. Fizzy Glitch leaped across the body of the great beast, striking it repeatedly. TantaByte tried to smack her away, but Fizzy was moving too fast. She shifted into Nirik, leaving trails of fire all over TantaByte, burning it with every ounce of anger. Finally TantaByte caught her and swatted her away like a fly. Fizzy fell back down to the ground, collapsed in a heap; her hammer lost to one side of her. TantaByte stomped on Fizzy’s hammer, and Fizzy reached out in futility as it dispersed into unrecoverable data.
The Tantabus took a wild swing with its scythe and sliced Discord and Yearling in one hit. Caballeron barely sidestepped, but was immediately caught by the followup swing. Their voices became garbled as they screamed, their bodies beginning to dissipate in a spray of digitized atoms. “No!” Fizzy screamed, the shock yanking her back to her Kirin form long enough to look for a restore function on her gauntlet. But this wasn’t a ban from a moderator. This was deresolution. This was death. Fizzy looked through tear-soaked eyes at her fading allies and then back to the Tantabus. Her sobs slowly changed to heavy breathing, her sadness slowly changed to anger, and her eyes ignited. Fine then. I’ll be the god of this place.
Fizzy pulled the fated sheet of paper from her armor and tossed it on the ground. She raised her hoof. “Page from The Book of All Stories, grant me superiority over this abomination!” Fizzy slammed her hoof on top of the page and it scattered into a thousand geometric shapes and mathematical equations. The numbers and symbols surrounded Fizzy and then shot into her body. Rays of light spread everywhere and her body became a luminous wireframe. Fizzy screamed like a banshee as her Nirik body grew in size and the pixelated embers rising from her became wilder.
Her wireframe body and her Nirik pixel fire changed from blue to red. Her mane and tail grew in length and a dazzling display of silver hexagons danced across them.
Her horn split repeatedly in a symmetrical pattern until it had sixteen points. Luminous ones and zeroes poured from her body like a waterfall.
Massive wings grew from her sides and unfolded with awe-inspiring magnificence.
She opened her wrathful eyes and stared at TantaByte like a machine locking onto a target.
Fizzy’s wireframe body faded, giving way to a new solid form, neither Kirin nor Nirik.
TantaByte almost grinned, beckoning the new arrival to attack. Whatever remained of FatalError’s former self ignored the taunt and made its way over to Caballeron, Yearling, and Discord. The Tantabus approached and FatalError crouched low on all fours, hissing at the approaching predator to warn it back. FatalError raised her forehoof over the fading forms and channeled her power into them.
Caballeron, Yearling, and Discord slowly came to their senses, and were now entirely confused at the sight of two beast-like critters staring each other down.
Nightmare FatalError stretched an arm out to one side, and a massive poleaxe materialized in her hoof.
The others quickly backed away as FatalError shrieked like a falcon and lunged. The two weapons spun around frantically, sending prismatic sparks everywhere. The movement of the two creatures appeared as little more than a blur to the outside observers.
TantaByte tried multiple times to attack the tree again, but FatalError successfully repelled it every time. TantaByte caught FatalError with its teeth, and FatalError responded by turning her pixel flames into a massive fireball. TantaByte immediately released its prey and reeled from the pain. FatalError twirled and fanned out her wings, slicing at her nemesis like the blades of a blender. TantaByte bucked from below, sending FatalError high into the air. FatalError used the height to dive back down and execute a blazing strike.
FatalError could barely be seen now within her armor of scarlet flames. There was simply a burning meteorite zipping around and colliding with TantaByte again and again. TantaByte took a wild swing with its hammer and sent FatalError crashing to the ground, dimming her flames considerably. FatalError opened her mouth and unleashed a jet of plasma that forced TantaByte to leap away.
TantaByte changed tactics and tried to attack the tree once more. FatalError leaped in and was there to block in the blink of an eye. The clash of the two massive weapons began once again. After a few dozen attempts at striking the tree, TantaByte’s hammer was smacked away by FatalError. The Tantabus was an easy target now. FatalError struck it with her poleaxe for the first time. TantaByte groaned and recoiled. Before it could finish falling, FatalError struck again; the sheer force slamming it into the ground so fiercely that luminous cracks appeared in the floor. FatalError did not relent. Each attack had more anger behind it than the last.
“I hate you!” FatalError’s voice echoed through the digital space. She screamed it over and over as she deleted one piece of the Tantabus at a time.
Fizzy’s allies could only look on with both awe and terror as the corrupted Kirin continued to whale on the helpless monster. It couldn’t defend itself; it was too fragmented. Checksum invalid. But still, FatalError continued; her attacks becoming ever stronger. Under the strain, her poleaxe broke in half.
Nightmare FatalError screamed again. She took to the air and unfolded her magnificent geometric wings. Electricity crackled around her entire body and then focused into her horns. FatalError’s eyes burned like supernovas. Thin beams projected from each of her antler tips, converging at a single point, and from that point, a burst of energy worthy of any Alicorn rushed towards the doomed foe.
A ferocious wind pushed back Discord, Caballeron, and Yearling, and punched a massive hole in the storm clouds above, as the TantaByte was swallowed by an explosion of white and red data fragments. Where the Tantabus was a moment ago, only a gaping hole in the floor remained, beyond which was nothing but infinite darkness.
TantaByte was gone, and the massive Nightmare FatalError looked around for another target. Her eyes were full of pain. Lashing out with no focus, she raised her forehooves up and slammed them down, cracking the ground. Her voice was no longer coherent, nor were her movements. There was no sign of a Kirin, and no hint of a Nirik. The abomination before them was just unrelenting emotion: hatred and sadness.
“How do we stop this?” Caballeron asked.
Nightmare FatalError’s digital fire continued to get brighter. Energy from every direction was pouring into her.
“I’m going to try something,” Yearling said, and immediately ran towards FatalError.
“A.K.!” Caballeron yelled, but it was too late.
Yearling ducked beneath a wild flap of FatalError’s deadly wings, and grabbed hold of the behemoth’s leg. I hope this works. “Escape!” Yearling screamed.
Light cascaded from above and spirited the two of them away.
Discord and Caballeron looked at each other and then both called out, “Escape!”
Silence. Evidence of the digital time travelers was gone. The tree that gave rise to a fandom continued to grow. Posts spread and expanded into more posts, becoming a proliferative fractal of lives touching other lives, leading the users to something new; something different. A world was forever changed by a world coming to life, in turn, breathing life into infinitely more worlds, like a book of all stories.