“You know, I think the worst part is the unimaginitiveness of it,“ Discord groused, as he watched himself and the human-turned-draconequus duel each other in the air above Ponyville. “I honestly expected better from her. I mean, really, flying around and shooting magic beams at each other? Is that what a battle between two chaos deities is supposed to look like? What am I, a Marvel movie villain?”
“A what?” said the red-maned pegasus in a half-distracted tone. Her focus was on the two-key keyboard that she was prodding with her wingtips, as the hologram projected by the crystal disk in front of her continued to fluctuate, displaying in miniature the scene that was happening in the nonsensical reality-warped Ponyville in front of them.
“You wouldn’t get it. But trust me, it was a good one! Very topical and funny!”
Discord laughed at the reminiscence of his own joke, to no response. Then, he sighed.
“But, no. The real worst part is how unappreciated the true artform is! I mean, that last line I said to her in the Everfree, I came up with that one on the spot, you know!”
He cleared his throat, narrowed his eyes to a glare, then suffused his voice with all the dark menace that he could muster.
“Tell me… Do you know what happens when a fever dreamer dies?”
He laughed again, suddenly back to his irreverent tone.
“I mean, that is just good!”
Instead of being impressed, the pegasus didn’t say anything, as she focused on the running annotated transcript of the conversation between Sunset and her friends. Neither did the blue-coated unicorn stallion sitting next to her, silently tapping on his own keyboard. The cream-colored earth mare next to him, however, didn’t have a keyboard. Just a ushanka covering her blonde mane, a giant crystalline gun aimed at Discord with her hoof, and a thick Whinnyapolis accent.
“Oh, now, I thought you were just terrific there, Discord!” she said cheerily. “Real menacing and portentous and all that! Exactly the kind of narrative manipulation to steer her into setting up this whole deal here instead of Celestia-knows-what-else, fer sure!”
“Yes, thank you! Finally, someone here gets it!” Discord looked at her. “Though, uh, if you wouldn’t mind, could you point that thing away from me?”
“Oh, gosh, my mistake, sorry there!” She pointed the crystalline gun away from Discord, and back up at Wallflower. “Force of habit, ya know.”
“Speaking of narrative manipulation…” spoke up the blue unicorn stallion, not looking away from the hologram. “It looks like there’s a scene conclusion starting to be set up here. Type Zero.”
“Oh, they grow up so fast!” Discord wiped a tear away from his eye. “By instinct, she knows that she’s in a reality bubble and she’s trying to generate the magical energy to break out of it, using the creatures around her as mere pawns! It’s just like watching a baby learn to walk for the first time! And I do mean that literally. That’s exactly what it is for us draconequuses.”
The pegasus spoke up. “Wait, huh. It definitely is Type Zero. Except they’re doing it by, uh, kissing each other?”
Sure enough, the hologram showed Sunset Shimmer planting a sloppy kiss on the human Pinkie Pie’s pony form’s lips, followed by trotting up to the human Twilight’s pony form and kissing her as well. As the scene rolled on, all four creatures just watched in silence as the mares kissed each other and explained to the pony Twilight’s pony form just why they were doing so.
“Is that, uh, really how friendship magic works over in their world?” asked the pegasus. “‘Cause if you ask me, that sure does look like what a sad, lonely teenage girl would come up with if she could suddenly make reality whatever she wanted.”
“Well, that’s the thing about reality magic,” the unicorn replied. “If it wasn’t the case before, well…”
The unicorn clicked on a key, and a stream of numbers flowed through a corner of the hologram, all glowing green.
“And it’s consistent!” Discord exclaimed. “If you check all your records on their world right now, everything would fit, because it just works from the point of view of consensus pony reality. And there’s no way for you to know if that was her doing or if reality was always like this! Isn’t that neat?”
The unicorn gave him an unamused look.
“We’ll see how it shakes out in the final calculations. Whichever one it picks… I guess that is the one we’ll go with.”
“But you’re unsure, aren’t you? Whether this is reality magic or not. Ha, look at your face! You’re not sure! Now that’s how you bend reality! Oh, I am so proud!”
He turned to the mare who was aiming the crystalline gun at Wallflower.
“What if we kept her? I could raise her as my own! Maybe the experience of parenthood was what I needed all along to be truly self-actualized? Could you really find it in your heart to deny me such a gift?”
The mare gave him a sympathetic look, but didn’t say anything..
Discord tried again.
“Pretty please?” He batted his eyelashes. “I’ve been so good!”
“Oh, I’m sorry, dear! That sure sounds nice, and I’m sure it would mean a lot to ya, but we just can’t have an unaligned reality-bending deity running about, can we? After all, you wouldn’t want your Fluttershy’s biography to be all twisted up accidentally by even the tiniest tendril of reality magic, would ya?“
At this, Discord frowned, clenching his jaw.
“No, I wouldn’t want that.” Ungrimacing, he put a claw up on his forehead as a Rarity-esque woe-is-me. “Oh, what has become of me? Am I really that easy to–”
“We’re out of time! They’re beginning to glow!” shouted the pegasus as she dramatically tapped a key. The hologram shifted from a recreation of Ponyville to a writhing mass of calculations. “It’s now or never, ma’am! Let’s un-collapse this thing!”
“You betcha! Time to do what you do best, Discord!”
Discord let the calculations wash over him, into his own subconscious. Unbidden, his claw reached out to manipulate them slightly, guided by the chaos. “Not bad,” he said. “You ponies are getting better at this. This should work, as far as I can tell.”
At that, the unicorn shut off the hologram, and levitated the crystal disk to affix it to the gun. “Ready, ma’am!” he shouted.
The earthmare beamed at the draconequus.
“You’re our greatest asset, dontcha know!”
She then took aim at the only other draconequus that existed in this reality. The only other draconequus that Discord had seen in millennia. Since before the very first Bronze Age pony tribes built their very first cities in perfectly square little grids.
“We just couldn’t do this without you!”
And as the reality bubble surrounding Ponyville began to dissolve in the face of the human version of friendship magic generated within, she fired.
“And now it’s time for you to do what you do best,” Discord muttered as the local reality faded to red. “Fade into the background, and let us protagonists take center stage.”
Wallflower had never seen a creature like this one before.
It looked like a cross between a horse and a dragon, and a lion, and a bird, and a lizard, and who knew what else. Well, less a cross between those things and more like various body parts of those things stuck together in a way that didn’t even make any sense. It was floating in the air without flapping either of its mismatched wings, not that it would make any sense for such tiny wings to keep it up in the air in the first place. And it was staring at her, wordlessly, with a smile that was so familiar that it was unnerving.
She dug her hoof into the ground, finding a strange comfort in the connection between her hoof and the earth. She wondered if she should say something to this creature, but then what would she even say? She was bad enough at this with humans the same age as her who went to the same school as she did. Could this creature even talk? Did she–
“You!”
Wallflower yelped as a booming voice thundered from behind her. “I didn’t park in the staff lot!” she blurted.
“Discord! Explain your presence!” commanded an unmistakable voice. The mare who shouted was tall, and had her wings spread open in a defensive stance.
“V-Vice Principal Luna? I–”
“Really, now? ‘Explain your presence’? Not ‘Hi, how are you’? I certainly hope you don’t greet all your old friends that way!” spoke an unfamiliar voice, and Wallflower realized that the strange creature could indeed talk, and that the horse version of Vice Principal Luna hadn’t been talking to her at all.
“Worry not, Discord. I do not greet my old friends this way,” stated horse Vice Principal Luna as she flared out her wings even more. “Now. Explain what you are doing here!”
“Well, if you must know!”
Discord floated down to put a paw on Wallflower’s withers, and Luna’s eyes widened as if noticing Wallflower’s presence for the first time.
“I’m here to stop this little runaway from getting herself even more lost in this Everfree before she falls into a swamp or gets eaten by a creature or worse. A runaway who wouldn’t even be here, if that one had been more responsible with her little portal!”
Discord pointed a claw to an orange and red pony that was peeking out from behind Luna’s wings.
“Sunset!” Wallflower shouted.
“Wallflower?” Sunset moved Luna’s wing out of the way. “What are you doing here?”
“I got worried, so I followed you through the portal!” Wallflower shouted, before shrinking back on herself at Sunset’s confused look in response.
“What a heartwarming reunion!” interrupted Discord. “But there’s a much more pressing question here. Namely, what’s with your horn there, Princess?”
Luna, of course, didn’t have a horn, and instead had a strange, cream-like substance smeared on her forehead where a horn would be. Discord was barely stifling a laugh.
“This is hardly a laughing matter! Do you not see that this situation of mismatched parts is most serious?” Luna said, pointing at her own forehead with a hoof, and Discord could not stifle his laugh any longer.
“Yeah!” shouted a familiar, raspy voice, as a cyan pony with a purple horn stepped out in front of Luna’s wings as well. This must have been Rainbow Dash, though Wallflower didn’t know why that caused Discord to laugh even harder. More ponies revealed themselves, their color schemes matching up to what Wallflower could recognize as Sunset’s friends, and each reveal elicited yet another laugh from Discord, especially the two identical-looking purple ponies that must have been Twilight. Wait, how could they both be Twilight?
“Yeah, yeah,” said one of the Twilights. “Once you’ve had enough, could you tell us what’s going on with this, Discord? And how to fix it?”
“Oh, but I haven’t even gotten started! There are so many jokes I could make about this!” he exclaimed, to the unamused look of everypony present except Wallflower, who was just confused.
“But now is sadly not the time,” Discord lamented. “This is the worst day ever!”
Discord struck a dramatic pose, then slowly sunk back down to lay a paw on Wallflower’s withers again.
“But if you must know. The reason for all this is her. She’s not supposed to be here.”
“What?” Sunset said, looking around at her friends. “Are you saying that they shouldn’t have come through the portal?“
”No, I wasn’t talking about them. Just her.” Discord looked at Wallflower meaningfully. “Her being in this universe causes something to… break.”