Of all the different things I felt for the brothers, annoyance, aggravation, and begrudging respect; hate was strangely enough not among them. Maybe it was just a matter of perspective; sure, maybe I would soon find myself passenger of a sinking ship, but at least I wouldn’t have to spend another thousand years in stone.
Not that that stopped me from muttering a curse, “When I get my claws on you, your entire bloodline’s horns will be replaced with rubber…”
“ACT WITH HASTE! THIS BEETH HARDER THAN IT APPEARS!” Luna’s strained voice interrupted any attempts at formulating revenge, and if on cue a single shot slipped past Luna’s defenses and put a neat little hole into the wall, sending splinters and sawdust flying everywhere..
I dusted myself off and threw the manual aside. This was no time for reading!
...and I highly doubted that even my own sizeable intellect would have grasped the intrinsics of advanced magitech fast enough to prevent us from meeting the seaponies. The ship’s controls were vast and complicated, an enormous array of buttons and dials. I tapped on one of the dials, a sign above it read “Alpha-Pressurization” while it’s neighbour apparently displayed “Wavelength Coherence”. Not that I knew what any of that meant.
Luckily enough in the deeps of my mind lay the secret to an age old technique which had never disappointed me in the long years of my life. I raised my claw… reached out… and pressed a random button.
Then I pushed a few more, pulled a few levers, and turned some thingamajigs for good measure.
My chest swelled with pride as I looked at my work. Flashing lights, screeching pipes, and wildly spinning dials, combined with the moaning sound of metal on metal, to form a truly glorious cacophony; It was befitting the lord of chaos.
With anticipation I watched pressure gauges rising, and return valves bursting. I gripped the wheel with both hands, waiting for something, anything, to happen.
Then the noise died down.
“AH, COME ON!” I voiced my frustration. What is the world coming to, when playing around with unstable magical machines doesn’t even cause something to blow up?!
With renewed vigor I assaulted the controls, playing the buttons and levers, like a virtuoso would his instrument, my paw and claw literally tap dancing over the controls. But the machines remained dormant, and judging from Luna’s groans and curses, the moment where she would be overwhelmed by the combined power of a battleship worth of mages drew closer.
I reattached my hands and stormed down the stairs. By now Luna had changed her tactics, splitting her shield into several smaller discs which moved in to intercept the projectiles that were thrown at us. While this may have conserved some of her energy, her frantic eyes and stone faced expression gave away the amount of concentration that was needed to guide all those shields. As I skidded past Luna I blurted something along the lines of, “Engine, kaputt” and without giving her the time for a reply I jumped down the stairs into the belly of the Spirit of Enterprise. While I sailed through the air I desperately tried to remember the exact motions that were needed to break my fall, which proved futile anyway since another salvo shook the ship and robbed me of any semblance of control over my trajectory.
With an audible thud I crashed into the wooden planks, but jumped to my feet right away… Okay maybe I spend a few seconds just groaning while silently begrudging my fate, but after that I jumped back to my feet right away. By now the ship was shaking violently, partly because of the impacts, partly because all that magic in the air was sure to create some turbulences. Unsteadily I made my way to the engine room, my eagle claw digging into the walls.
The engine room was in the exact same state as we left it, barebone, except for the iron sphere in it’s middle. But just as I had suspected, the machine lay lifeless, it’s black form showing no sign of magic, not to speak of movement.
This was bad...
Not to speak of the problems that currently prevented me from manifesting any meaningful magical effect, there was still the issue that I didn’t want to imagine what would happen if I poured my own chaotic brand of thaumaturgical power into a machine which was created for unicorns.
…
On second thought, I really DID want to find out.
Absentminded I snapped my claws, only getting the rather disappointing lack of anything which previous attempts had provided. I groaned, as I was once again reminded of my current lack of omnipotence. Rolling my eyes, I concentrated on the core of my being, like some lowly alicorn, and drew out the anarchic powers, guiding it all the way from my heart to the tip of my paws.
My reward was a small orb, it’s surface shining with a wild mix of colours, which usually had such flattering names as ‘toxic green’, ‘slime’, or my personal favourite, ‘oily black’.
“Ehehehe…” a small cackle escaped my lips as I pushed the sphere closer to the machines inlet. Sparks zapped between the surface of the metal fixture that sat on the equator of the metal sphere, ready to take in magical energy, and the orb on the tip of my finger. Then, with a sound like a breaking violin string, the magic was completely absorbed by the machine.
I waited…
Slowly the machine came to life, the gauges, scales, and valves performing the same hectic dance, as when the unicorn had animated it before.
My shoulders dropped. Here I was doing my best to cause some chaos, and yet the most disorder me and Luna had to face during our journey, hadn’t even been caused by me. Was I losing my touch?
Then my brain got sucked out through a straw…
---
“Discord,” Luna addressed me.
“Yes?” I replied.
“Stop doing that,” the princess of the night reprimanded me.
“Doing what?” it was now my turn to ask.
“Melting,” she stated matter of factly.
“Only if you stop turning into a platypus,” I shot back.
“Excuse me?” a ape in a cashmere suit interrupted our conversation.
“Yes?” I answered, when I realized that Luna couldn’t reply, her snout having been turned into a beak and all that.
“Mind telling me the time, good chap?” the ape asked in a polite hoofington accent.
“Luna, do you have a clock?”
“Quack!” Luna replied, apparently having left the waters of mammallism, and opting for a form more suited for flying, swimming, and eating bread crumbs…
“Sorry, we don’t know either,” I finally answered the dapper primate.
“Nevermind then,” he replied, threw his feces at me and absconded into deep space.
“Discord, what’s going on?” Luna shouted, her voice filled with panic. I have to admit that being stretched into infinity on my x-axis, might have cause me some distress as well.
“Probably just a bit of chaos,” I replied nonchalantly, while my eyes turned into pudding.
“Then make it stop!” Luna screamed. Undoubtedly something unpleasant was happening to her, which made me glad that desserts aren’t very good visual organs.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk. Luna, I expected better of you. You should know that chaos by definition, cannot be controlled,” I schooled her. I shuffled around trying to find a comfortable position for the new appendages I had sprouted.
“Aren’t you the master of chaos?!” she continued her verbal barrage, as she struggled with losing the up and down dimension and having it replaced with peppermint.
“I’m the spirit of chaos,” I corrected her. “The effects should subside soon anyway. I didn’t put enough energy into it, to last longer.”
As if on cue, a discorporate voice announced, “Approaching T-e^1546% uncertainty, falling.”
“What was that?” Luna asked finally having figured out how to look left and peppermint.
“The penguin, or the voice?” Luna’s constant trail of question was tiring to say the least, especially in this place where reason and syntax had such variable meanings.
“The voice.”
“Probably nothing important. Most likely just a coincidence, those happen alot around me,” I answered sweetly.
If Luna asked any further questions, I didn’t pay any attention to them. All around us was glorious, wild, free, unpredictable, chaos. No bounds, no rules, and what little form there was, served only as a reminder of the natureless state of the all-nothing around us. And some part of me resonated with this place. I could feel my body change shape and turn every which way, sometimes passing through itself, or traveling in two different directions in time at once. And not only my body, but my thoughts, my soul, everything about me was in constant flux. None of it scared me; it was like… like home.
Then it all fell apart, the universe stretched towards a single pinpoint before slingshotting back into place.
The surreal chaos all around us was replaced by the all too real chaos of the normal world, as I and Luna found ourselves clinging to the fur of a giant platypus, that was hanging several feet above the water surface.
Okay, maybe normal wasn’t exactly the right term.
---
Over time a lot of people have attributed the creation of Platypi to me, which of course is completely and utterly wrong. Indeed Platypi were already around when I came into existence. And really, they aren’t my style.
Not that I never created animals, far from it. If rumors are to be believed the gryphons still haven’t gotten rid of all of my dropbears, and I’m pretty sure that even today dragons still stay away from all dandelions out of fear that they are going to uproot themselves and attack.
“But Discord,” I hear you asking, “don’t they have mismatched bodies just like yourself?”
And that’s where you are sorely mistaken; Platypi might seem mismatched but as it often is the case, one should never judge a book by it’s cover. Those little buggers are fairly normal as far as animals go, and I would never accept such a mundane creature as part of my glorious chaos…
… and should anybody tell you that this is because one of them scratched me with it’s poisoned talons, he’s a dirty liar.
Old grudges aside, I was far too busy holding onto it’s fur for dear life, to bother with any other thoughts. Let me tell you, a oily coat that’s made for swimming isn’t a particular good handhold.
“Aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh….” Luna screamed as our mammalian life raft plummeted towards the sea below us.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh….” I replied as I felt my hands slowly slipping.
“Gruuuuuuh…” the Platypus chimed in unhelpfully.
“Splash!” the ocean had the final word when our fall ended as abruptly as it had started.
A torrent of water arose all around us, and for the shortest of moment the salty sea water formed a dark blue canopy of light and motion, before crushing down on us like a ton of bricks, as we performed what probably was the world’s largest belly-flop. Sputtering and coughing the trio of us emerged from the water, like a cork shooting out of a champagne bottle, and once again our combined screams echoed over the rocking planes of the sea, before the breath was pressed from our lungs by the second impact.
Luckily, our new ride seemed just as dazed as we were, which bought us a few precious minutes to catch our breaths, and expel whatever salt-water we had swallowed. While Luna was busy cursing my name, I took the chance to survey our surroundings: The good news was, that there was no sign of the city-guards ships. The Bad news was, that there was no sign of anything else either, just the gentle rocking of waves as far as the eye could see…