Let us turn our gaze to Discord, draconequus ascendant. Master of trickery, doctor of diabolical disruption, snappy dresser. He breaks the laws of reality like other people jay-walk, and he walks on the clearly marked do-not-walk grass of spacetime, littering all he pleases and never getting fined for it.
Domesticisty, hmm...Domesticord, perhaps? Has the beast of chaos been tamed? Has the patron saint of fun had his mix tapes confiscated at last? Perhaps, or perhaps not. Who could-
“Screwball.”
-could truly comprehend the workings of such a mind, and would not to do so plunge one self-
“Screwball. Now come on.”
-one self into eldritch union with the seething madness therein?
“Screwball, really, enough with the monologuing.” Discord tapped his chin with some regard. “Admittantly the deep baritone voice was unexpected. Good projection.” Discord pouted. “It’s more of a simmering madness anyway. Very fondue like, I’ll have you know.”
Screwball stopped staring at words that weren’t there when at the same time they were the only thing there when nothing else was and attempted to focus her dizzily spiraling eyes on the more mundane present in time to get a pat on the head.
“Snappy dresser, though? You little flatterer, you. Now come along, let me show you this grand design.”
Quick to joy and eager to please, the utterly devoted, utterly I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-butterly-insane chaos pony that is Screwball hovered along behind her master in a most floaty manner.
She was, by taciturn law, responsibility, sensibility and other such boring things not supposed to be his. But the law has a way of quietly shuffling around abnormalities like sweet little Screwy, who wouldn’t have noticed it passing her by anyway. Though possibly it’s shoe laces, which have that sort of bowling alley neon green brightness to them, and where do you even get laces like that outside of bowling alleys?
Presently the two chaos beings were stalking the halls of Canterlot Castle. In fact they were something between residents and guests, airily and pompously marching about the place like they owned it, but when one is a chaos being ‘stalking the halls’ is a default stereotyping that is not easy to throw off.
It’s not just trope-y, it’s entropy.
Discord was in a deviously delighted mood, more so than usual because today was the day that Celestia was returning from a week long trade summit with the griffons. He could of course have pestered her at any time he wished but that would have been unfairly fair to himself, and Discord was nothing if not fairly unfair. Acting within arbitrary, hypocritical and pointless bounds gave him ever so pleasent a shiver, don’t you know.
“Don’t ewe know their sheep?” hazarded Screwball uncertaintly. The words behind the world could be ever so distracting, and worst still was that her watching them caused them to change, and that changed her, which changed them in turn, looping and looping infinitteeellllyyyyyy
<<UNIVERSE REBOOTING.>>
<<PLEASE STAND BY.>>
.
..
...
.
..
...
<<REBOOT SUCCESSFUL!>>
<<CONTINUE FROM LAST SAVE?>>
yyyyllllleeeettinifini gnipool...<<INITIALIZE.>> looping...a lot. Discord paused, turned also to stare and sighed. Then everything shook as he gave the side of the perceived narrative a thump with his paw.
“There, back on track. Really Screwy, you have to be more careful about doing that! Oh who am I kidding? I was a young little reality warper once too. Seeing you break the world sends my timeless heart a-flutter. But, my little minion, we have more mundane concerns ahead!”
Screwy blinked. “Celestia?”
“That’s right! Now, look here, what do you see at this door? And if you mention the narrative again, charming as it is, I shall have to make sure your ice cream is swirled counter-coriolis, am I understood?”
Properly chastised, Screwball nodded. “Not at all,” she said in absolute sincerity. “It’s a door,” she guessed. Doors were often known to be door shape.
“Yes it is, and do you know which door this one just so happens to be?”
Screwball screwed up with screwy thought. Coherency for her was like trying to use a slinky as a ruler. Straight lines of obvious connection were so hard...
“The door that’s always open?”
Discord spluttered. “What? No! It’s Celestia’s door for heavens’ sake! Her chamber doors!” A wave of his talon made the intervening matter transluscent. “Now there, on the frame, do you see what I’ve placed?”
Screwball hesitated, not because she couldn’t perceive what the object in question was, but because even by their non-sense-making standards this made no nonsense. “A bucket of whitewash?” she said incredulously.
“Yes!” cheered Discord like a warlord who has just taken the field in triumph. “A perfectly ordinary bucket of perfectly ordinary whitewash, balanced with perfectly ordinary, and might I add perfectly boring, physical laws.” He held up his minion and stared her in the eye, his own gone huge and wide, as if he beheld the everything beyond infinite. “It is the perfect prank,” he said in a voice of rapture.
A second wave of his talon and the nude matter was once more made modest and opaque. “It is a trick to play upon my little Celestia that makes no sense whatsoever. None at all! Not even nonsense! Beyond random, beyond pointless, inane in the utmost, insane in the extreme!”
Discord twirled Screwy in a ballet for joy. “Oh, to think this could be one that finally warps her precious little sanity and brings her to the fun side of the farce! I am positively giddy, my minion!”
“Giddy-up!” cheered on the chaos pony.
Discord gasped. “Quick, hide! here she comes, exhausted to the utmost, frustrated to the last, teetering on the brink of frayed-hair meltdown at the end of her worst week in years! Glorious!” the lord of chaos squee’d shamelessly before diving invisibly under the sunlight as it shone on the marble floor.
Indeed Celestia was all such things as Discord had declared. The trade delegation was of the worst sort, intractable egos and irreconcilable pettiness and diplomacy of the most assinine calibre. The alicorn dragged herself with the liveliness of a zombie and the bouncy demanour of a black hole’s event horizon. Her eyes were red, her mane was in tatters, her coat marred with sleeplessness and blood-caffeine content probably post-critical.
“Bath.” the Scarelestia growled with animalistic primevality. “Sleep.”
Discord watched all this attentively from his hiding place on the other side of the reflection. She was twenty paces away. Ten now. Five, two, one. The door was swinging open...
He uncoiled and sprung with massless, lightless, soundless severity, slipping ghostily through the door frame itself, catching the bucket before it could fall. Thus holding it, Celestia passed beneath the draconequus, ignorant and unmolested as she went grumbling to her rest.
Screwball stepped politely back into casual existence. “I have no idea what’s going on!” she proclaimed excitedly, and decided that these were perfectly good grounds for a standing ovation. Or at least she again was peeking at the narrative, and decided to go for it all the same. “A double triple miple stiple bluff!” she cheered, diamonds being flung from her left hoof and roses from her right while an unseen crowd applauded Discord’s performance.
His mood for antics seemed gone, however, and with a distracted snap of a claw Screwball’s little presentation ceased. He watched for a moment, seeing how Celestia dropped her weary self into a steaming bath and all but melted in the hot waters. And he felt...glad.
Then Discord turned about-heel and stalked away through halls to think, and this was proper melancholic hall-stalking, because for once he worried if he had not devised a trick so grand as to snap upon himself its foolery. But again he thought of Celestia finding comfort in her baths, and again he felt...glad.
And to think the same thing twice, and get the same meaning of it, the same import? HIM? That was insanity...
“Come along, Screwball,” he said with less gung-ho than his norm, “let’s go troll Luna for a while.”
“What about Celestia?”
“No, she’s fine just the way she is. She’s had enough this week.”
Screwy, whom it bears repeating mention is stark raving mad, didn’t make any cohesive sense of this, and forgot any such considerations soon after because the narrative told her to.
Luna, however, did not.