Chapter 2: Atlantits
Two hours after arriving at this world, I discovered something astounding: being physical is unbearably annoying. I felt thirsty, my wings ached from flying, I had had to stop so I could pee, and my eyes itched due to the wind and flying facing the Sun. At least I could actually see Atlantis. When Discord said that Atlantis was a floating island, I thought it would be, like, small enough for someone to walk from one end to the other in an hour. The humongous floating landmass in the horizon would take days to traverse! I guessed I still needed to fly for eight more hours before I could land on the floating continent, so I stopped flapping my wings and used my magic to levitate towards my destination.
Great, now that I don’t even have to flap my wings I’m getting bored. At least I can levitate without Discord's block interfering. Speaking of that creepy old man... Discooooooooord. I’m booooooooored.
Sucks to be you, then.
Aaaaaaaaaw travelling is so boooooring. If only I could teleport! How am I supposed to survive this boredom? That island is so far away!
Not so easy to enjoy yourself without the whole multiverse at your disposal, huh? If I were you I wouldn’t do something as boring as flying in a straight line towards Atlantis, spice things up a little bit, girl!
How?
In every job that must be done there’s an element of fun. And every task you undertake becomes a piece of cake.
Are you really going to sing me a song with that female voice in the background? I was not amused.
Aw Hell no I don’t want to be sued for copyright infringement. Plus my singing really needs some improvement. Just remember: a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.
You HAD to project that song into my head to force me to hear it even if you don’t sing it, didn’t you?
Indeed.
I ignored Discord’s song and, following his advice, looked around in order to find something fun. I looked down but the ground was a boring green plain with a few trees here and there, which didn’t give me any ideas. Then I flew into a cloud.
“Weeeeee!” I exclaimed as I shaped the cloud into a convertible car that I drove through the sky. I decided to also turn on the radio.
“News? I want music!” I tuned in to a different station, but it was also boring news. At last, I found a station I liked on the third try.
Some minutes later I grew bored of driving a car, so it turned into a bicycle. The bicycle became annoying way sooner, so I turned it into a jet plane. Then it was a sailing ship, then a huge motorcycle, followed by a spaceship, a submarine, a walrus, a police box and a jetpack. When I finally condensed the cloud into water and drank it the sun was setting and I had reached the coast. Atlantis was floating above the sea, several kilometers away from my location. I turned the white sand of the beach I landed on into a mansion - which obviously was not made of sand - and I walked towards it. I was about to go inside when my stomach grumbled, something that really startled me as I didn’t expect my body to do that. It took me a few seconds to realize what that sound meant: I was hungry.
Discooooooord. How do I find food? I’m hungryyyyy!
Did you make yourself omnivore?
I don’t knooooow!
Your head is of a carnivore, and if you don’t know you probably didn’t realize you could make your innards able to digest anything, so I guess you can only eat meat. You’ll have to hunt something. Hunting can be really fun!
Yay, monster hunting!
No, not that kind of hunting. Monsters taste bad, anyways. You have to hunt something that you can eat afterwards. There’s a forest nearby, you will find preys there.
Roger that.
I walked towards the forest, remembering all the hunts I had observed from the Nexus. Since I was a lone hunter, I would have to be sneaky or any potential prey would flee. I tried walking on all fours, but my legs weren’t meant for such a position, and my water arm had to be turned into ice for that, so I laid on my belly and slithered silently, trying to detect any living being. After a few minutes I heard something moving in a bush a few meters in front of me. A grin grew in my face as I slithered towards it, slower than before so my limbs wouldn’t make a noise by hitting something. I flinched when my mechanical leg brushed some fallen branches, making a noise. A bunny jumped out of the bush, and it dodged me as I tried to grab it with my hands. The bunny darted away and soon I couldn’t even hear him running. It was clear that I couldn’t keep up with something so agile, so I decided to use magic to kill whatever I found next.
An hour later I hadn’t found anything I could eat. Annoyed, I got up and began walking back to the beach, resigned to postpone my first physical meal ever. I had just walked a few meters when I heard a sound similar to a gasp coming from my left side, so I made a lightning spear appear on my right hand and threw it at the source of the noise. The spear shone so brightly that I couldn’t see what I had attacked, but I could heard a sharp cry of pain that was cut short by the spear exploding with violence. I walked towards the charred ground and found that my victim had been blown up into pieces by my spell, so I couldn’t recognise what it was before I killed it. I levitated all the pieces I could find and happily returned to my mansion. Some minutes later I was sitting before a table with a dish with the charred remains of whatever I had killed on it. I wasn’t sure if I should eat it raw or cooked, so I cut a small piece that had been “cooked” by the explosion with my right hand and slowly chewed it.
It.
Was.
Awesome.
I could go on for minutes about how incredible it was to taste something for the first time in my life. It was so radically different to anything I had ever experienced before that it took me a full minute to be able to continue eating. I experimented eating different parts that were either raw or had been organs instead of muscles. I found that some things tasted better, but there were very few parts I had to spit because they tasted bad. My meal seemed to have been some sort of mammal, since most of it was covered in a short fur. However, I also found some feathers, which forced me to think what animal could have both at the same time. Discord had told me that both cynogriffins and alicorns were mammals that also had wings, so I decided to ask him if there were more creatures in this world with the same characteristics.
Hey, Discord. What the heck am I eating? It has fur and feathers. Did I just hunt a flying boar or what?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
What the fuck are you laughing at?
Pfffffffft. I can’t believe you are eating that! Hahahahahahaha!
I decided that I should really know what I was eating as soon as possible. I dropped the limb I had been eating for the last minutes, and then I realized that the limb ended in a hoof. I levitated everything and I also found a horn that was no longer attached to the rest of the body.
Fur, wings, hooves and horn… OOOOOOH! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA I’m eating an alicorn!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
We continued laughing for several minutes. I found, to my surprise, that laughing with a physical body was slightly different to laughing in the Nexus, but it was similar enough for me to keep laughing without feeling weird.
… Hold on, didn’t you say alicorns were very powerful? How come it died so easily?
Because you just killed and ate an alicorn child, they aren’t able to use magic until they get older!
Hahahahaha! Should I be worried about this child’s parents coming after me? Parents are surprisingly violent when their offspring is damaged.
That could be an issue, indeed. Hehehe. You aren’t ready to fight adult alicorns yet.
Meh, I will just hide the remains and if they find me I’ll act all naïve and innocent.
Act?
Go have sexual intercourse with a pincushion man.
Oh, my. Such rudeness.
I no longer felt the desire to eat, so I snapped my fingers and the remains of my dinner were teleported a few million millimeters away, so they would sink into the ocean and no one could relate them to me. I floated to the bedroom and I was soon laying on the bed, wondering what sleeping would be like.
“Uuuuuugh why does everything hurt so much?” I moaned as I walked outside.
I had woken up a couple of minutes earlier, disappointed because I hadn’t had a single dream. Not even a nightmare! To make it worse, it seemed that my brain was barely working, and the only thing I wanted was to stay on the bed forever. I had always thought that “being sleepy” was just an excuse created by lazy mortals, but now I knew better. When I finally mustered enough willpower to get up, I gasped in a mix of surprise and pain. My whole body ached and felt stiff! I had no idea what was happening. I had asked Discord, convinced that he had somehow caused this to have fun at my expense, and he had explained me that it was normal to feel like this when straining your muscles too much. I knew he wasn’t lying, as I had watched quite a few mortals suffer these symptoms, but feeling them first-hand was a completely new and unwanted experience.
"Alright, I’ll fly up there and then find breakfast," I thought aloud.
Since I was too sore to use my wings, I simply levitated towards Atlantis.
Hey Disdis. What can I eat in Atlantis? I guess the cynos won’t be as easy to hunt.
Well, my dear Chuckles, there are three kind of creatures on Atlantis: insanely fast ones, ridiculously strong ones, and critters that are good at hiding. Everything else has been hunted to extinction by the cynogriffins. You could try eating some of the fruits you will find there, you will find that some of them are rather… Peculiar.
Didn’t you say that I could only eat meat?
I say lots of things, not all of them can be true.
If you had told me to eat fruits I wouldn’t have eaten an alicorn child.
I know, isn’t it hilarious?
It totally is.
Oh, one little detail I forgot to mention. You are about to enter Atlantis’ airzone. Once you do, leaving it will disqualify you, so stay in Atlantis. Never fly below the continent or too high above it and you won’t risk breaking that rule.
In the name of Chaos just how many rules are there?!
A lot. Most only affect me, though.
Such as?
Such as: you can’t tell your champion how to defeat other champions.
Hah, I don’t need you to tell me, there is no way I will be defeated by a bunch of harmony-loving losers. Hey! I reached Atlantis!
I had finally ascended enough to see what Atlantis’ upper portion looked like. An immense forest was all I could see, even after going higher and higher until the trees looked like ants.
“A forest? Boring, let’s see what lies beyond it,” I thought aloud.
I put on aviator glasses so my eyes wouldn’t itch and I levitated as fast as possible, the ground below me becoming a blur. Just as I was about to break the sound barrier, I surrounded myself with an energy barrier to protect my body from the sonic boom. I felt the barrier break, and when I looked back I realized that I had caused something really beautiful to appear on the sky. For the next minutes I flew like that, leaving a trail of beauty and trippiness behind me.
Suddenly, something large and heavy collided against me from below. The sudden impact dazed me, so I could only stare confused at the huge brown bear with giant curved claws that had appeared out of nowhere and was roaring at me.
“Say whaaaa-” I began to say, but the bear turned my words into a cry of pain when it attacked me with its claws, wounding my chest. I had never felt something like this pain before, but I forced myself to focus on the matter at hand. I pushed the abnormal bear away from me with magic and quickly dismembered it with a strong telekinetic pull. I looked down, wondering where the heck that bear had come from, just in time to see another bear darting towards me. I made my water arm grow and turn into a sword of ice just in time to cut the bear in two vertically as I dodged his attack. Before I could rejoice in my victory, another bear hit me from behind, injuring my tentacle tail and human leg. Enraged, I threw a beam of electricity, fire and arcane energy at him, which caused him to explode in a gory mess.
“FUCKING JUMPING BEARS I’M GOING TO FUCKING KILL ALL OF YOU MOTHERFUCKERS!” I shouted, driven mad by the pain and the frustration.
I landed on the ground so the bears couldn’t jump me from any direction and continued advancing in the same direction I had before the attack. I was so angry that I killed anything I saw, especially bears. An hour or so later I calmed down and decided to stop.
“Oh, great, I’m still bleeding,” I tried to touch one of the wounds, but as soon as I did I hissed in pain.
DISCORD! When will I be able to heal myself again?!
In no less than a week.
Damn! How do I heal myself without magic?
You only have to… Oh, I can’t tell you. It’s against the rules.
Ug… I should have really paid attention to how mortals healed their wounds without magic.
I think it’s unbelievably unfair, but the others are forcing me to stop talking to you unless you want to talk about something else. They say that I could indirectly tell you what to do.
That is exactly what you were going to do, right?
Yes.
I laughed a bit, but the pain of my wounds was killing the mood. I thought hard of all the wounded mortals I had seen from the Nexus, trying to guess just what was what they did when they got wounded. Then I remembered something: they always wore bandages over the wounds.
“Ha ha!” I exclaimed as I made bandages appear and wrap around my wounds. “Now that’s more like it.”
I began to move again, bored of the harmful jumping bears and the endless forest.
