Breakdown

by McPoodle


Chapter 8: The Devil's Greatest Trick

Breakdown

Chapter 8: The Devil’s Greatest Trick


The Master, especially as portrayed by Roger Delgado against Jon Pertwee’s Doctor Who, doesn’t make a lick of sense as a traditional antagonist. Under Pertwee, the Doctor is stuck taking care of a single primitive planet, Earth, which the Master could so very easily take over. But in fact all of the Master’s plans to take over the world inevitably fail, and in addition these plans were obviously doomed to fail from the moment of inception. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that everything the Master touches falls apart.

The shippers, being, well...shippers, interpret this to mean that the only reason the Master is doing this is in order to set up loud confrontations with the Doctor, confrontations that they of course fantasize as ending in steamy sex, because apparently that’s the consequence of all loud confrontations ever.

It took me decades, but eventually I figured out that the Master’s goal was not control, despite the obvious name and the way he acts. Because if Pertwee’s Doctor uncharacteristically works for “The Man” in the form of UNIT, if he’s an agent of Order with a capital “O”, then the Master, as the Doctor’s opposite, must have the opposite goal. The Master’s true goal always was and always will be chaos.

For you see the Master...is Discord.


How long has it been, do you think? Ever since the sun set, I’ve lost all track of time.

Surely, somebody noticed my absence? Surely, my rescue is imminent?

It’s...it’s so cold down here.

Is this it? Is this where I’m going to die?


Is it even worth continuing my story at this point? I encounter other ponies, famous ponies, ponies with stories you could seek out and read if you wish, stories where I am the out-and-out villain.

And what of it? What do I care what other people think of me? My actions speak for themselves.

And it’s not like you’re really there, George. You’re just a construct, an excuse, a way for me to pass the time until my rescue. Until my inevitable rescue. You listen to my tale of how I reached this sad end, so that you can nod your head and tell me that I was right, and that everypony else was wrong. And in exchange, I don’t have to think about how long I’ve been down here, how the rain will not stop falling...along with the temperature. I am getting out of here, and afterwards I’ll joke about the good times we had over a glass of Chardonnay.

Except you don’t exist. Indeed, if I start believing in you, that would be a very bad sign. A very bad sign indeed. Because I’m alone down here. All...alone.

You’re my sanity detector, George. Don’t ever change.


Day 12: Threesday, 3 PM EST


So, to continue this tale that I am obviously telling myself and not an imaginary person, I had arrived in Indianapolis in the early afternoon, accompanied by Benjamin/Rain Shimmer and the Mitchells.

For those who might be interested, Benjamin’s parents had still not been found, and Benjamin needed a great deal of comforting on this fact. As children were wont to do, he even started blaming himself, believing that they were deliberately hiding so they wouldn’t have to go back to being his parents. It just breaks my heart when this sort of thing happens—childhoods prematurely terminated by bad luck, or deliberate deception. What had this kid done to deserve being thrown in with P.A.P.A., to be separated from his parents for so long, or to be yoked to such a corrosive force of cynicism like Rain Shimmer?

It didn’t help that P.A.P.A. seemed to have some sort of relationship with Discord. I can’t say for sure if he hired them to do what they did to Benjamin, but if not, he cynically took advantage of the situation to bring me into his employ, when he clearly had the power to do something to help.

This was the sort of being I was working for. In secret, as my throbbing hand reminded me.

~ ~ ~

The rain started when we were flying over Colorado. Of course that was where it would start.


Matters with Miss Bliss went better than expected. There was a teary-eyed reunion between the two pony lovers, and after all that the teacher had been through, there were no reservations whatsoever about moving back to her home state. But she wouldn’t be moving back immediately—there were affairs to put in order, friends to say goodbye to, and closing down the doomed campaign to get her job back. She considered it important to personally convey her thanks to this last group, to keep them from thinking for a moment that she was taking advantage of all of their hard work, only to abandon them the moment a higher-paying job appeared. This would take several days.

And that meant I needed to part ways with them. I had business back home, and I wanted to keep an eye on Danielle. Not to mention Hasbro’s pointless assignment: having to horse-sit the Pink Princess of Pandemonium herself.

Did I mention that this city stank? The fumes of automobiles were everywhere. How could the people here stand it?


The limo dropped me off at a building not that far off in appearance from the one where the Buster Friendly show was taped. From the outside, these things look vaguely like warehouses, although inside of course they are organized like theaters with a massive A/V section bolted in front.

I went in the back door...

No, I went in the front door...

...I got in there somehow. I found my dressing room...I mean, I must have found my dressing room, because the idea that I would go on live television without checking my appearance once since leaving Los Angeles is absurd. But I don’t remember doing it.

I do apologize, George, if the story’s sort of falling apart on me. And I remember Fluttershy waiting in the darkness, a straight razor held in her lips and utterly black eyes, as she...

No! No, that didn’t happen. Not yet, and I don’t think ever.

I...I think?


So...cold...


I was...I was backstage, yes, I was backstage; staring at the curtain, waiting for the show to start. Thinking about Gary.

What was I going to do about Gary?

I read Danielle’s email for perhaps the tenth or twentieth time since the plane had landed. I wish I could quote it for you, but there seems to be a seething maelstrom of missed opportunity and lost hope in that part of my memories that I can’t see past. Probably because of the way that Danielle wrote it.

She had gone into Gary’s bedroom seconds after I lifted off from LAX, only to discover that Gary had become the pony Gold Star, Wave Rider’s younger brother.

She didn’t have a problem with it. She reported the transformation of the closest person in her life without a shred of emotion. Something was happening back in that apartment. Something horrible. I needed to get back there as soon as possible, or something irreversible was going to happen.

I could just feel it.

Or maybe my memory of what actually did happen has partly overwritten this memory. It’s all getting very confusing.

~ ~ ~

It was backstage that I met Pinkie Pie. Or rather, the gestalt that resulted from scrambling the brains of Pinkie Pie and her human. She wore clothes. I find it odd that so few of the ponies I’ve seen in the news have been dressed. Here, with the rain pouring down outside, clothes on a furred creature made perfect sense.

Around her neck was the Element of Laughter. Now that was interesting. Did each of the Bearers appear on Earth with their elements, or did they have to repeat the ritual from the pilot episode to get Earth copies out of some rocks?

Anyway, she was sitting in a chair, clutching a stuffed dragon. Not Spike. Maybe Spyro, or Figment from Walt Disney World? The colors seem to swirl in my mind, so I can’t really be sure.

She raised her head, and our eyes met. This would be the moment for the mind games. If Pinkie was dominant, then she would try to lift my obviously doom-laden mood.

Seeing as the Bearers were treated only a bit less than royalty in the show after the defeat of Discord, I bowed lightly to her and introduced myself.

“Well if it isn’t George,” she said cuttingly. “What a coincidence—I buried a George last Thursday.”

Wait, why did she call me George? And why does it sound like she’s speaking with my voice?

“Nathan,” I corrected her. “Or Dr. Franklin, if you wish to be formal. I’m sorry for your loss.”

She introduced her dragon. It was Spyro. She gave it the same degree of respect as the animated Pinkie gave to her pet alligator. Was Spyro alive? In this crazy world, it was entirely possible.

That out of the way, I gave her a friendly warning. This was the Jason Taverner Show, after all, and the goal of the Jason Taverner Show is always to manipulate your guests into hitting each over the head with the fold-up chair.

She shrugged it off. “So you’re the Loyal Opposition,” she told me with a smirk.

A bewigged dragon runs in fear from an army of rampaging griffons dressed like Eighteenth Century peasants, fully equipped for a tar-and-feathering session.

Where the hell did that come from?!

A second later, the vision was gone. I shook my head, and Pinkie quite rightly looked at me like I had lost my mind for a second.

I tried to figure out what she meant by her phrase. Did she think I was P.A.P.A.’s spokesperson? But then I saw that she had been browsing the website Danielle and I had created. I gave her a speech, the sort of speech I’ve already given you, about how I only wished to help ponies, and how my beliefs about merging would not stand in the way of my commitment. And then I told her that this was, in the end, her show and not mine, and that I would trot any of this rhetoric out only if I thought the situation absolutely demanded it.

Pinkie Pie/Human Whoever accepted this remarkably calmly. “By the way, the eye thing doesn’t work for me,” she then told. “One, my human side is an aspie, so I emote differently. Two, as a pony, even if there are similarities, my nervous system is not completely identical with a human’s. And three: I’m Pinkie Freakin’ Pie. Party Proletariat, Mistress of Mania, Ceaser of Comprehension, and a bunch of made-up titles emphasizing my insanity.”

Wow, what a conceited jackass.

After a few seconds of my silence, she added, “I’m not sure whether I should be insulted you think you can read me so easily.”

I continued to stare at her like she was a statue.

“We’re on in five!” a random stagehand informed us.

“You know, you really shouldn’t believe everything you see on TV,” I said with a smirk.

It’s like I’ve always said: perception trumps reality. It doesn’t matter if the rule actually makes sense, only that you can trick everybody else into thinking it makes sense.

“You know, I don’t really watch TV that often,” Pinkie feebly retorted.

Like that had anything to do with my ability to control any situation I found myself in.

That was my thought at the time. Feel free to contrast that moment of false bravado with several others in this story so far, George, or for that matter to the moment I am currently telling you this story from.

~ ~ ~

The show announced itself with an inoffensive little ditty that wasn’t supposed to resemble any other copyrighted tune, but...

Overture. Curtain, lights...” Pinkie wasn’t speaking, merely mouthing out the words. But I could understand them easily enough, and I silently face-palmed. There was no way now not to hear it as the Bugs Bunny Show theme.

On a positive note, this was recognizably Pinkie Pie, not the cold aspie I had been speaking with earlier. Perhaps it was possible that instead of either remaining separate or merging, Pinkie/whoever had chosen C) All or None of the Above. I wouldn’t put it past her.

The voice of an announcer who sounded like he had been borrowed from late-night college radio spoke over the music, saying, “Hasbro and Moderna Designs present: An Evening with Pinkie Pie.”

Pinkie seemed to be as surprised as I was that the show was being co-sponsored by the world’s leading furnishings company.

“Yes folks,” the announcer continued, “Moderna Designs present the latest in kitchen luxury: the Moderna Wonder-major All-Automatic Convenience Centerette.” There were oohs and ahhs from the audience as an image of a thoroughly ordinary kitchen was placed up on the monitors.

I began to wonder if the audience had been borrowed from the set of the latest Sham-Wow demonstration.

A curly-haired man in a periwinkle suit stepped into the limelight. A broad grin appeared to be a surgically applied part of his face. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I’m Jason Taverner. And it’s my great pleasure to introduce to you the individual who made this wonderful night possible. The one, the only...Pinkie Pie!”

The audience put on their best polite applause. All except for Discord, who was sitting at the back. Watching and waiting for me to fail him, so he could subject me to the incredible tortures that he thought up in his dreams.

Nobody else seemed to notice him. In fact, when I think about him in my memory, he seems superimposed over another figure who was all in shadows. So, maybe he wasn’t there? Or maybe he was actually in my mind? Or maybe he still is?


Just to switch tracks, let me remind you that I have been substituting names as I’ve been telling this story. The host of this show is not actually named after the main character from Philip K. Dick’s novel Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, any more than the Los Angeles show I appeared at a few days earlier was actually hosted by the character from Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? And of course the furnishings company co-sponsoring the show was the Swedish behemoth you’re probably thinking of, instead of an extremely obscure joke from the movie Time Bandits (too obscure for a YouTube link, as a matter of fact).

Anyway, Flow My Tears is one of Dick’s lesser-known works, so let me refresh your memory of it: Jason Taverner is a shallow and self-centered talk show host. One day he wakes up in an alternate universe America that is a dystopian police state. Nobody knows who he is and worse, he lacks the identification needed to prevent himself being rounded up by the secret police. After stumbling through this nightmare world for a while, he is found by Alys Bruckman, a rich drug addict, and Taverner’s primary stalker in the world that he came from. Alys had been experimenting with a drug so powerful that it warps reality. Since she was unable to make Tavener into her lover in the real world, she used her drug-fueled powers to pull them both into an alternate reality where he was utterly at her mercy. He is only saved when she overdoses, returning him to reality.

So how’s this for an idea: What if My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic really is nothing more than a work of fiction? What if our world had its own “Alys Bruckman”, a madman or -woman with reality-warping powers, someone who was so devoted to the show and the character of Discord that s/he became Discord, and as Discord, started to turn everybody on Earth into ponies?

Do you realize what this would mean?


The stagehand was looking at me. I think I missed my cue.

I stepped out onto the stage, the four chairs in a row, the preening host standing in the aisles with that really long stick microphone borrowed from 1970’s The Price is Right, the battered folding chair waiting in the wings like Chekhov’s Gun for its inevitable entrance in the third act, and watching it all, the audience of rabid jackals...

Who the hell is this conceited jackass?” Al Bundy cried out at my entrance. A portion of the crowd chuckled their agreement.

I sat down next to Pinkie Pie. And yes, she was sitting like a human instead of a pony.

After all, that’s what she really is.

“Now before we begin taking questions, Pinkie,” the host addressed the pony, “do you have any sort of statement you wish to make?”

A human. She’s nothing but a human, warped into a foreign shape by the will of another.

“Humanity rocks,” she said after a moment’s thought, “and we are not establishing conversion bureaus.”

Yes, of course. Give the wavering supporters of the ponies that search term to look up on Google. I’m sure it will vastly increase your support.

~ ~ ~

Now I don‘t want to do Miss Pie any disservice, but the majority of the questions that night were extraordinarily banal. Or phrased in such a way as to make the appearance of the folding chair inevitable. Neither of which make for questions you would care to read about. Of course you can track Miss Pie down yourself to get her account, if I am mistaken in my assumption.

That and I really can’t remember a lot of it.

So let’s just skip ahead to the good bits.

~ ~ ~

Victoria Thorndyke took the mike, attired in a powder-blue pantsuit. “On behalf of my husband, who couldn’t be here, I’d like to ask: When will this madness end?” She leveled an accusatory glare at Mr. Taverner for her husband’s absence. Ah, Madeline Kahn—you’re not allowed to change, either.

“Well not anytime soon, I hope,” I quipped. “Madness is a good part of my revenue stream.”

What? If Pinkie Pie is allowed to make a Conversion Bureau crack, I’m completely justified in making a pot-shot at my own profession.

“To be quite honest, I don’t know which madness you’re talking about exactly,” Pinkie said, in her attempt to answer the question. “The madness of people turning into ponies? Well, the magic that’s causing that is probably being maintained by Discord,” ...maintained and created... “and me and the other bearers are headed to New York in order to deal with him, so...a couple of days, perhaps. The madness of people actually being ponies...I can make no statement regarding the reversal of the condition. The madness of people mistreating and prosecuting ponies just because they’re ponies? I hope that will end extremely soon. The madness of the calendar? That just needs the timekeeper folks to get together and patch up that mess, a day’s a day no matter what it’s named.”

Now I didn’t correct Pinkie out loud, but that last part about the calendar is nowhere near as simple as she thought. The earth was moving around the sun at a fraction of the speed it normally took. As a result, a whole calendar year would end up being squeezed into a single solar week, based on where the earth should have been in its orbit. And yes, under normal physics, that change should have caused the Earth to fall into the Sun. But obviously, that hasn’t happened.

How do I know this? Well because of that one lecture I saw on TV by that one professor...Zarkov? I swore I saw it...although it looks an awful lot like my college Physics 101 class when I think about it.

This is getting ridiculous.

“The madness of deep fried salad, though, that’s something I’m really interested in. I mean, deep frying tomatoes? What’s up with that?” That was Pinkie speaking—obviously.

An imaginary voice, portraying an imaginary character, holding a real person hostage with full consent.

Cera from The Land Before Time took the mike. No, she was definitely human, so why am I thinking triceratops?

“How do we know these ponies aren’t gonna go crazy and kill us?”

Oh that’s right—she’s a triceratops in my mind because she’s thinking like an insane herbivore, someone who frames all change in the form of predation.

Of course, Pinkie’s the wrong pony to be asking this question, considering that she had a homicidal maniac inside of her brain even before she arrived on Earth. Sure enough:

“I’m perfectly safe as long as you don’t threaten our friends or family. If you did that, then I’d be forced to rip your throat out.” That last part sounded like Pazuzu from The Exorcist, which may mean that I was only thinking that she said it.

The next question was interrupted by the smell of smoke coming from the Moderna Designs Kitchen of the Future. A stagehand opened the toaster oven, only to discover a piece of concentrated evil. He reached in to remove it with his bare hands...

“No, don’t touch it, it’s Evil!” Kevin cried out.

The stagehand touched it (because nobody ever listens to Kevin) and was instantly annihilated.

Nobody seemed to care about this turn of events. Did it even happen? I’m not sure. It does seem to only exist to justify my use of Moderna Designs in this chapter in the first place.

There was...um, there was a question about whether the transformations were permanent. Of course, we didn’t know the answer to that, and Pinkie Pie made an empty promise that they would reduce the number of involuntary transformations.

Doesn’t she realize yet that this madness will only die with Discord?

~ ~ ~

The inevitable baiting session happened here. What little I had to say was completely worthless in satisfying the paranoid nut-job who had taken over the show. Pinkie Pie decided to respond to this by baking, while I choose to respond to it but not bothering to put either questions or answers on this page.

~ ~ ~

“Do either of you know how long this is going to last?” Carl Fredricksen asked.

The madness has no end, just as my imprisonment here in this pit has no end. No end, and no beginning, an eternal frozen darkness of fraying sanity...

“Let’s see, where are we at?” I quipped, because of course I had no premonition of the fate that Discord was even then preparing for me. “Nine points into Save the Cat!, or only eight? We definitely haven’t reached ‘Bad Guys Close In’. So as a back-of-the-envelope estimate, I’d say we’re on page 55, out of 110.”

“Oh wait, this is real life, not a Hollywood scriptwriting formula?” I added sarcastically. “Then I really have no idea when this will end. When Good triumphs over Evil, I suppose.”

God, I’m such a conceited jackass.

Considering that Pinkie Pie was currently cooking with ingredients that most certainly didn’t exist 30 seconds ago, I thought I’d satisfy my personal curiosity at that point. “How do you cook a soufflé without it collapsing?” I asked.

“It’s impossible,” she replied calmly. “The trick is to delay the collapse.”

Now that’s interesting, because that answer implied that Pinkie was in fact constrained in her toonish nature, by the standard set of rules that cartoon-obsessed nerds came up with decades ago.

Because of course an imaginary pony could manipulate reality—she could sorta do it in the show, and she could definitely do it in the diseased brain of the person who devolved into Discord, so of course the created pony personality could do the same.

Then she added a good point in response to Carl’s question: “A society that builds all of this, these cameras, this kitchen, that air conditioning system, those standardized chairs...how can a society like that not defeat discord with a lower-case D? So Discord with a capital D, Discord with an oh-so-punchable face, that’s easy peasy, vanilla squeezy!” In part of that last sentence, it seems that my memory started playing wish fulfilment again—I’ll let you guess which part.

Somebody who actually knew Pinkie Speak interjected: “Don’t you mean ‘lemon squeezy’?”

“Does it look like I’m making lemon cake here?” she replied.

The interesting thing about introducing toon rules into a real-world environment, is whether those rules are now available by us regular folk. I decided that an experiment would be in order: “Hey,” I addressed the studio crew, “could somebody put the recipe for whatever that is up on the still store?”

I beamed when a recipe dutifully appeared, followed by the muffled confusion by the crew trying to figure out where the hell it came from, especially since the studio wasn’t even equipped with a still store.

(By the way, I thank Mystery Science Theater 3000 for learning what that old-fashioned piece of television technology was in the first place.)

Back in the audience, a clearly terrified David Kessler asked if there’s a chance that people were turning into anything other than harmless ponies.

“Thus far, the only replacement style inter-universal transport appears to be centered on the world in which Equestria resides,” Pinkie quipped, thinking herself very clever, but managing to go completely over everyone’s heads.

The poor kid nearly had a heart attack before his sister Rachel convinced him that no, he’s not going to devour his family in his sleep.

Dr. Miles Bennell asked if the condition of turning into a pony was contagious, or if there were any known triggers for transformation or ways to avoid it.

“Well...” Pinkie shrugged nonchalantly. “Quite frankly, I don’t know.”

Once again, I was forced to step in to quell a panic. “I’m still doing research on this with my clients,” I told the audience. “It appears to be public knowledge that everyone converted so far was a fan of the show before this whole business began, and so far I’ve seen no conclusive evidence to the contrary, but beyond that I know nothing.”

“Actually, that’s not true,” Pinkie piped in. “I’ve met those who transformed without ever having heard of the series. However, there does appear to be a pattern, personality-wise. It’s complementary. If you and the pony were characters on some buddy cop show, it would work.”

This made a disturbing amount of sense. Especially for my two clients. But the same could be extrapolated for the pink pony I was sitting next to, to judge her personality now compared to how she was portrayed on the show. Canon Pinkie had a pathological need to make other ponies happy at all times in order to prevent the collapse of her own self-esteem. If the merge had been everything that its supporters had promised, the Pinkie before me would still be the Element of Laughter, still the source of happiness for all, while not being neurotically obsessed about it, and able to be happy for herself. But instead, the pony before me was causing fear and hatred without realizing it, because of her aspie-like inability to competently handle the chaotic emotions of non-aspies. Canon Pinkie Pie would never pull a practical joke on Fluttershy, because she knew when certain forms of humor were going too far. Merged Pinkie Pie on the other hand would make some utterly inappropriate comment that would drive the pegasus into a suicide attempt, and would be absolutely clueless in the aftermath that it was all her fault. In other words, the theme behind picking personalities to match was not so much making them complementary, as making them contradictory. The merge had not “helped” Pinkie Pie—it had crippled her. And if the Element of Laughter was crippled, then Equestria was well and truly doomed.

And if you realized that Equestria was a big fat lie, then everything, the hundreds or thousands trekking to New York City, the Bearers and their Elements, were all in the end a waste, a waste that would end with madness and murder on a global scale.

Seen through this lens, Discord giving me the power to enter dreams was not a piece of manipulation on par with what he did to the poor dumb kids who wanted or needed to be ponies, but was a cry for help. He had given me the only tool capable of saving these poor deluded souls from the madness he had inflicted on them. For the good of humanity, I had to seek out and cure the pony sicknesses in each afflicted human’s mind...

...Before it was too late for all of us.