Breakdown
Chapter 7: And Here My Troubles Began
So cold...so dark.
How long have I been down here? Is there anybody up there? Anybody at all?
Oh, there you are. Now, where were we?
I remember spending long periods of time in the end trying to exhaust every possible reason why Mom and Dad should love me more than you. One obvious handle to use against you was that you loved Doctor Who, while I was a normal human being.
For example, Doctor Who’s arch-enemy, The Master, did not appear until the seventh season of the classic series. Up till that time the producers evidently thought that something as ludicrous as an “arch-enemy” wasn’t needed. I made sure to express this opinion to you as soon as I realized it, which was roughly ten minutes into Terror of the Autons’ airtime on the PBS affiliate where we first saw it thirty years ago. (And yes, I did deliberately refer to the main character as “Doctor Who” instead of “The Doctor” all the time, just to piss you off.)
That show thought it was so damn clever. A villain who could control people just by staring at them. Cheap plastic toys that somehow acquired the internal musculature to actually be able to choke their victims to death. And of course most humiliating of all for any self-professed true fan, the awful, awful green-screen technology on display. (Blue screen? Whatever.)
They even wasted this cheap trick on the scene when a Time Lord appears at a radio telescope to tell Doctor Who that this pantomime-level villain has settled down on his beloved Earth to cause trouble. He appeared as the stereotypical Englishman, bowler hat and umbrella, “so not to attract attention”. This despite appearing in mid-air hundreds of feet above the ground. Such an obvious parody of Magritte’s Golconda—I mean, what kind of loser actually watches this show?
Of course you know full well how you won that argument. Dirty pool, George, dirty pool.
Now the point of my story is...where was I? It’s getting a little hard to think clearly when I’m trying to talk over the sound of all this falling water. I wish that it would stop and let me think...
Oh right, I remember: Discord tricked me into leaving Los Angeles.
The date was...well the day after the previous day, obviously.
Day 12: Threesday, 7:30 AM
Yes, that right there.
I was awakened by a call by Sally, telling me she had tracked down Rain Shimmer’s marefriend, Cerulean Sunrise. She was sharing a body with Carrie Bliss, a junior high school teacher in Indianapolis. Miss Bliss became a cause célèbre after being fired for the crime of trying to teach and be a pony of impressionable human children at the same time. All appeals thus far to reverse her dismissal had failed, so it was clear that Miss Bliss would never teach in Indiana again. Sally helpfully informed me that Miss Bliss had lived in Southern California before moving to Indianapolis, and she had a still-valid Californian teaching license.
The solution seemed obvious: give California the chance to prove the moral superiority of its educational system by hiring the spurned pony. Unfortunately this ran up against political complications—namely, that no public school district wanted to stretch their necks out and risk the possible consequences of hiring her. And the politicians shied away from letting any old private school have her, just in case that particular school had a negative stigma to voters of its own, so they were bringing up a variety of quibbles about the exact nature of that Californian teaching license. The impasse would be resolved eventually, but it would take time.
And time was one thing that Rain Shower wasn’t willing to give me, as the call at 9:45 made abundantly clear.
I stepped out into the second-floor walkway of Danielle’s apartment complex to think...and that’s when I found myself face-to-face with a floating Englishman, complete with bowler hat and umbrella.
“Excuse me?” I asked. I wanted to follow that up with a question about why he was violating the Law of Gravity, but at the last moment I considered it a bit presumptuous. I mean, if he wants to float, that should be his business, right?
“My name is Sir Arthur Slugworth, and I represent Hasbro Unlimited,” the man told me, his words backed by a choir of angels.
For some reason, nobody else walking around at this time seemed to notice any of these odd happenings other than me.
“Discord?” I attempted to ask.
I mean, it’s the only logical possibility, right? That or I was hallucinating the whole thing, and you know full well that I never hallucinate, George.
When I say “attempted to ask”, I mean to say that I opened my mouth and got out the “D” sound, but was then struck by a debilitating pain radiating from my right hand that knocked me right off of my feet. A debilitating pain, that originated from the two scars left on my right hand by my deal with Discord.
Now let me remind you of one of the lesser terms of our little deal: Discord was not to tell anybody about our relationship.
Well, it appears that the demon had cleverly reversed the terms of that agreement, as I had just discovered. The pain only went away when I stopped trying to say Discord’s name.
I took a few moments to recover. The representative from Hasbro was still there, but he was in an American suit instead of an English one, and he was standing on the walkway instead of floating in front of it. I suppose that made him a “Mister” now instead of a “Sir”.
“Are you Doctor Nathan Franklin?” Mr. Slugworth asked me.
I told him that I was.
“I was given your location by your secretary,” he told me. “I believe I have a solution to one of your problems.”
It turned out that Hasbro was a major benefactor of one of those private Californian schools that was willing to hire Miss Bliss. The school was close enough so that Rain Shimmer would be able to visit his marefriend on a regular basis without getting in trouble for violating curfew, and Mr. Slugworth assured me that the school would not be considered controversial. He was even willing to foot the bill to fly Rain Shimmer and the parents out to Indianapolis to make their case, and then to fly them and Miss Bliss back to Los Angeles (assuming she said yes).
“There is but one condition,” Mr. Slugworth said.
There always is.
“It appears that Pinkie Pie has decided to appear on an hour-long taping of the Jason Taverner Show in Indianapolis, and she’s sort of twisted our arm into making it into a live nationwide broadcast.”
The man was terrified by the idea of this broadcast, and he was perfectly justified. This was Pinkie Pie, practically the living and breathing mascot of Hasbro, and she’s asking to speak live in front of a potential audience of hundreds of millions of potential ex-customers. And she was Pinkie “IHOP Incident” Pie.
“We need somebody to keep her under control. We need a voice of reason. We need you, Dr. Franklin.”
I should have said no. I should have listened to the voice of reason in my own head and stayed as far away from the mad pink pony as possible. But when I looked into Arthur Slugworth’s eyes, I saw the eyes of Discord, and I knew then who arranged this sequence of events.
My contract was being activated, my services were required in Indianapolis, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.
So I got on a plane and left my beloved home of Los Angeles...
...Never to return.