“That’s right, my little fillies, me again. How was the trip?”
“I wanna go home,” pleaded a teary eyed Sandy.
Smarty Pants stomped her hooves in frustration before throwing her own questions right back at him. “What the hay, Discord? Throwing us back in time? What were you thinking?! I thought we were frien—”
“Friends? Pshaw, what do I need with mortal friends? All that heart break over somepony without the common decency to live forever? No, once is enough, thank you very much.”
“But… we can’t—” started the confused earthpony before being interrupted a second time.
“No, what I need is minions! And you three will do nicely,” he flicked her on the noggin and her golden eyes rolled about in her head.
Honeycrisp stood at the ready, with legs apart and her head lowered. “What do you want from us?” she snarled at the one-time nemesis of Harmony.
Discord landed on his mismatched legs with a thump that sent up a small cloud of fallen leaves. Wistfully, he snapped a pair of fuzzy fingers, and all around them the world faded to black.
Smarty Pants sat in the darkness and felt ears pop painfully. The ever-present smells of ripening apples and yellowing leaves left her nostrils on the next breath, and were immediately replaced with the tang of centuries old dust.
Smarty Pants felt oddly tired. Drained. It was all she could do to stay awake.
The three ponies sat in dark silence for a time. But then, a piercing line of color and light appeared in the dark horizon. The strip of light began to grow and fill the otherwise empty space like a sunrise. It was then that Smarty realized that the light came from a curtain being raised. A massively wide curtain in front of a window too large to be real.
As her eyes adjusted to the light, she tried to blink away the onset of exhaustion so she could marvel at the scene on display before her and her two best friends. The ground beyond the window was a chalky white, as if countless centuries of dust had piled up over hills and craters. She watched numbly as the bright ground cover gave way to a midnight blue backdrop filled with tiny spots of light as far as the eye could see.
It was a stunning night’s sky that was for sure, but there was something off the ground and how bright it was versus the night’s darkness. Then, as the curtain finished the last quarter of it’s assent, the moon came into view. It was unusually large, and Smarty Pants wasn’t sure why it was so verdant and green with life.
Then it hit her.
The facts came barreling through her brain and the implications sent shivers down her spine. “That’s no moon.” She heard herself mumble absentmindedly to the other girls.
A spotlight somewhere in the blackness above them sprang into life and shined down upon a familiar figure sitting on an obsidian throne raised on a pedestal and lined in strange blue stone, positioned in the front center of the room. But he wasn’t looking out to appreciate this once-in-a-lifetime view, no. He was facing the girls with his mismatched hands steepled in front of his smug smiling face.
After a moment, the draconequs drew in a breath through his nostrils and let it out with a grin. “Ladies, welcome to the moon.” As he spoke, his voice carried and echoed through the chamber, carrying the full weight of his words.
Smarty Pants turned her head sluggishly to look at her two friends as she heard Honeycrisp swallow audibly. Sandy was shaking like a leaf and she looked a bit greener about the cheeks, hard to do for a lime green pegasus. Smarty Pants herself felt wrong and had ever since her ears popped. But she was beginning to understand why.
Being an earthpony so far from the soil… Seeing the ground so far up in the sky above them... Well there were no words for it other than, disconnected.
The little brown earthpony never really noticed the hum of life beneath her hooves until now, when it was gone and sorely missed. Even last weekend, in Cloudsdale, the clouds felt of rain and life. This dead rock, this moon... The lack of life was an ache in her hooves as much as in her heart. Her tongue felt heavy and two sizes too big for her mouth and she continued to fight the urge to fall asleep where she stood.
“W-we’re on the moon?” she thought she heard one of her friends ask. Sandy, probably.
“Yes indeed, my dear. Luna’s little home away from home. Nice, isn’t it?” his smile faltered, “Well, truth be told, this throne room was last used by a different mare with a bit more flare for the dramatic. Or was it a bit less? Regardless,” Discord finished as he dragged a fuzzy finger across the throne’s armrest, “it could use a thorough dusting.”
“You want us to dust the m-moon?!” gasped Sandy.
“What?” asked Discord, immediately shaking his head. “No, no, no, silly filly. I need you three to go on a little treasure hunt for me.”
“On the moon?!” Sandy again.
“No! What is with with... Look, you don’t need to do anything on the moon except listen to what I’m about to say.”
“Then why are we on the moon?” asked a bewildered Honeycrisp.
The God of Chaos leapt out of the throne and down onto the carpet runner below. He threw his hands up into the air and growled, “Moon, moon, moon! What’s with all the moon questions?! You don’t like the moon? Fine.” The tufts of his tail snapped together and the world once again faded to black.
But like the sun breaking through clouds, Smarty Pants felt her whole body fill with warmth and life once more, from the frog of her hooves to the tippy top of her wavy red mane. She smiled and took big lung full of air.
And then she coughed it right back out with a frown.
“Ugh!” protested Honeycrisp with a wave of her hoof in front of her muzzle. “What’s that smell?”
“Bat guano,” said Discord in a manner so chipper that Smarty Pants could feel the grin on him.
It was still pitch black, and Smarty Pants was starting to wonder if Discord had low light vision. For the most part it was silent, save for the occasional rush of wind against a mane or the sporadic dripping of water somewhere in the distance. Above them, a new spotlight sprang into life, enveloping the draconequus before them in a cone of pure light.
“Ladies, welcome to...” Discord stopped speaking and stared out into the darkness. Then with a flick of will, he aimed his spotlight at something beyond the three fillies. “HOLY SOLAR FLARES, WHAT IN TARTARUS IS—”
A roar filled the air behind her, and Smarty Pants felt her coat become slathered in a foul smelling substance. When the roar subsided, she turned around to see what Discord was pointing at and Smarty Pants let out a roar of her own. One of pure, unadulterated pony terror.
The purple translucent creature looming over the four of them was like a bear, in the same way that an adult dragon was like a gecko. Its body was filled with stars, not unlike those they just witnessed from the moon. Hanging out of its mouth were two tower sized teeth, dripping with more of the foul smelling substance, that Smarty Pants, ever the eager student, quickly identified as ‘super icky giant bear monster saliva’.
The creature’s huge claws raked the cave floor, shattering stone and shaking the earth in a very real and very threatening way.
Curiously, a much smaller -though still larger than most houses- bear monster cub was huddled beneath the larger one, looking at the four of them as if they were the terrifying monsters. At that moment, the larger bear wiggled its massive rear and lunged at the completely and utterly boned quartette. Thinking she was going to die in this forgotten hole deep within the world, she squeezed her eyes shut and felt her friends huddle in around her.
If she had to go, at least she’d go in good company.
A second passed, and then another. More came and went, and she realized that she had not yet been eaten by a colossal momma bear. She peaked open an eye and let out the breath she didn’t know she was holding.
The unfortunately unforgetable smell of guano was gone for the most part, but not entirely as a shake of her head let her relive the ‘joy’ of the fragrant fumes that had coiled their way into her mane. Super, she thought to herself, could today get any weirder?
Opening both eyes, she was greeted with the sight of a curled up Discord, rocking back and forth as he held his knees in front of him. How he did this while floating in the air, was beyond her.
“W-where are we now?” asked Sandy.
Discord looked over and saw the three girls. Realizing that they were witnesses to his little break down, he straightened out and tried to be as nonchalant as possible. Which was rather difficult for a god who had narrowly avoided being devoured by one of the forty two Elder Things.
He cleared his voice and smiled his cocky-yet-oddly-reassuring grin. “We’re completely safe now. This is my own little dimension. A pocket of reality, if you will.” On a whim, he summoned four bean bags into existence and organized them on the floor such that nopony in his little audience would miss a second of what he had to say.
“So! Treasure hunt. You three. Gonna be fun!” he said, nodding enthusiastically. “Are you interested?”
Honeycrisp walked forward and plopped down in the beanbag in front of her and arched an eyebrow. “What if we’re not?”
“Oh, I see,” pouted Discord. “I save you three from a boring night of sitting around in a treehouse painting hooves and brushing each other’s manes, and this is the thanks I get?”
Honeycrisp grumbled and rubbed the aching spot on her forehead, just below the horn, “Discord... That’s not what—”
“No no, say no more. I know when I’m not wanted. I’ll just go ahead and see myself out.” He poofed out of existence, but not before sniffling back crocodile tears. Moments passed in silence as the three girls tried to piece together what the heck was going on.
Then it hit Smarty Pants just as she was thinking about getting up to leave.
“Oh horseapples,” cursed Smarty Pants from her beanbag. “Discord, come back!”
A second poof, and he appeared again in a ratty pink bathrobe and a bucket of ice cream tucked gingerly under his left arm. “Yes?” he asked as he spooned a scoop of the frozen dessert into his goateed maw.
“We’re stuck here until you let us leave, aren’t we?”
“Maybe.”
“And you’re not going to let us leave until we’ve agreed to your treasure hunt, are you?”
“Definitely.”
“WE’LL DO IT!” Shouted Sandy from the beanbag to Smarty Pants’ left. Her eyes were clamped closed and her face was scrunched up with determination.
Smarty smiled a good natured smile at her cowardly friend. Maybe Sandy was braver than the earthpony gave her credit for.
“I wanna go home and see my mommy,” muttered Sandy into a fidgeting wing.
Then again, maybe not. Thought Smarty Pants with a roll of the eyes.
She glanced over at her cousin who gave her a shrug and a nod before turning back to the draconequus. “Yeah,” Smarty sighed, “we’re in.”
“Splendid!” shouted the God of Chaos as three lists materialized into the pocket dimension. They danced through the still air before coming to a stop. One in front of each of the three girls.
Smarty Pants looked at the list and was a bit confused. There was no order, no real structure. She had two items written on her piece of paper. One of them vertically, the other with reversed letters and written backwards. One had a bullet point, and the other had a check box! At the wrong end! She blanched at the affront to checklists and found herself gritting her teeth in disgust.
She looked over at her two friends, but they seemed oblivious to the sacrilege that was apparent to her.
“A-a rubber chicken?”
“What the hay is a ‘breezy blossom’?”
Swallowing her pride for the moment, Smarty asked “So... Would any old spool of thread do, or—”
Discord shushed Smarty Pants with the tap of a fuzzy finger. “Oh, you’ll know it when you see it.”
“But how?”
As if to answer her question, there was a bright flash. A six sided box appeared. It was shaped like a perfectly carved gem.
It appeared in brilliant existence in the empty spot between the four assembled beanbags. The box shimmered prismatically as light from unseen sources danced across its gleaming metallic surface in rainbow waves.
For just a moment, she could swear that she saw the rainbow reflect again, but this time in the blue and pink eyes of her two friends sitting on bean bags next to her. Odd. She shook her head, and all three reflections were gone.
“Did that just happen?” she asked aloud.
“Did what just happen?” questioned Sandy as she draped her friend’s back with a lime green wing in comfort.
“...Nevermind.” Smarty Pants had never seen anything like that before. Or the box, for that matter. But she knew that whatever was in this box was important. Super important.
“So, uh. What is it?” asked Honeycrisp.
“It’s a box,” said Discord plainly, “More importantly it’s a locked box. And it needs six keys to open. If you’d be so kind to look at your lists, you’ll see that each of you needs to find two keys that are hidden here.”
Sandy looked around curiously. “Here? In your pocket detention?”
Discord chuckled despite himself, “No, not here here. Here,” he said as a window appeared above the locked rainbow box. The rainbow revealed a panning panorama of a small town with a surprising amount of hustle and bustle. “in Ponyville!” he said with grand flourish and a kazoo accompaniment.
Smarty Pants was ready to refute his claim, when the familiar outline of a certain library passed into view. Since when did Ponyville have dirt roads? she wondered to herself.
“Psh! Nice try, Discord, but that’s not Ponyville.” crowed Honeycrisp with a smirk.
“Oh firebug, how you wound me,” pouted Discord. “Of course it is. Or rather, of course it was.”
“Was?” asked Honeycrisp with her ears flattened to the back of her head as she nervously kneaded away at her beanbag.
“Was,” he nodded, “because the keys don’t exist in your time. Today, rather this today in the past, seems to be the last day in history that all six keys are accounted for.”
“Where did you get it?” asked Smarty Pants
“Get what?” asked Discord as he glanced this way and that about the little pocket dimension, “This?” he asked as he lifted the window to Ponyville up in his hands and inspected it from different angles.
“The box, Discord. The box.” sighed Smarty Pants while she rubbed her temples.
“Oh!” he exclaimed as the window faded into mist, “I’ve had this for ages. You know, it’s a funny story. Would you like to hear it?”
“No,” stated Honeycrisp plainly.
“Not really…” trailed off Sandy.
“Yes, please.” asked Smarty Pants as nicely as possible from behind the forehooves pressed against her eyes to stave off what was sure to be a headache.
“Right. So, there I was, minding my own business in Fluttershy’s bathroom, right? When all of a sudden, I felt something. Something that filled me with rage!”
“Uh...” started Smarty Pants, entirely sure she did not want to know what he felt in her really-great grandma’s bathroom.
“What was it?” asked Sandy, oblivious to or inspite of the implications.
Discord looked at the green filly and his expression soured at the memory of it. “It was an impostor!”
“An imposter?” asked an unbelieving Honeycrisp. “You mean like, another Discord?”
Smarty sat up straight and her red wavy tail tingled.
“Yes,” huffed Discord, "and he had the audacity to use my chaos magic!”
“Wait,” said Smarty Pants trying to interrupt, as her left shoulder began to twitch.
However Discord did not wait. “I had an awful time tracking him down at first. He was all over the place! Deep underground, way up in the sky beyond the clouds, but eventually he cornered himself in my pocket dimension!”
“Oh no, then what happened?” asked Sandy.
“Wait! You—” tried Smarty Pants again, as her ears flapped against her skull arhythmically.
But Discord was off to the races again with yet more exposition. “Well, I told Fluttershy, and she brought a few of her little friends along to face the impostor.” He smiled wistfully at the memory.
“Oh, you should have seen it. We fought for hours. And all over the globe, too! We even managed to knock loose a seal or two on some frosty prison holding those Wangdangers or whatever they’re called,” he said with a dismissive flick of the wrist.
Discord let out a nostalgic sigh as he finished his tale. “But, in the end, the impostor got away. For the life of me, I still have no idea how he did it.”
“Did you ever find him again?” asked Sandy hopefully.
“You know, I thought I did! Last week, in fact! But it was just me from the future. I was so sure he was bluffing again and I was about to take him, but the Beacon of Order really did a number on me,” he said with a disapproving shake of the head.
Smarty Pants found herself gritting her teeth as the tremors throughout her body intensified.
“But... What about the box?” asked Honeycrisp. “Did the impostor take it with him?”
“Oh no, child, no. The handsome devil left it behind. But it’s mine now. To the victors go the spoils, finder keepers, etcetera etcetera.”
He waved off another interruption from Smarty Pants. "Long story short,” he cooed as he pulled out a small felt bag with a drawstring from behind his back, “it’s taken me until just the other day when I finally had a free moment to give that wonderful new time walking spell from Celestia a spin…” He reached into the bag and pulled out a clawful of tiles. “To discover that the keys were somewhere... in...” with a flourish he cast the tiles onto the ground around the locked box.
“Ponyville!” he shouted triumphantly.
The tiles each had letters on their faces. There were seven of them.
“Cazique?” read aloud a befuddled Honeycrisp.
There was silence as the draconequus floated smugly in the still air, buffing his talons against his chest.
Then there was the sound of an unusually fidgety Smarty Pants clearing her throat. “D-Discord?” she finally got to ask, “When you say ‘ages’, are we t-talking hundreds of years or thousands of years-s?”
Discord stroked his chin with a leathery wing. “Oh, hundreds, definitely.”
“M-mhmm, and w-was there anything curious about this impostor? L-like did he look exactly like y-you and did he say say, oh I d-don’t know, that he was from the f-future or s-something?”
Discord stared at the tweaking filly and began to nod slowly. “Yes... How did you—”
“Okay, last q-question. W-was the imposter alone when you found him in your p-pocket dimension? P-perhaps some fillies were with him? Say, th-three fillies? Maybe they looked l-like us?”
Behind the three girls, Discord gasped. Then, in front of the three girls, Discord looked up and gasped at his gasping counterpart.
“Impostor!” yelled the new Discord.
Future Impostor Discord’s eyes became little red pin-pricks and he crossed his arms defensively in front of his face. “Wait, no! I’m from the future!” he pleaded.
“Lies!” spat the other, as he jumped through the air and collided into his doppelganger. They both tumbled off into the immeasurable ether beyond the walls of the pocket dimension in a flurry of teeth, claws, pancakes, golf clubs, and rubber duckies carefully labeled ‘TNT’ in big bright letters.
Squeak! went one such rubber ducky as it came to rest a few feet in front of the filly trio. It’s beady red eyes began to blink and a hissing sound filled the air.
Without meaning to, Smarty Pants found herself at the bottom of a rather sudden pony pile, with Sandy on top of her and Honeycrisp on top of Sandy. A red magical aura flickered and flashed around the three fillies on a single beanbag as the deadly bathtime toy exploded. The resulting inferno tried its best to eat through Honeycrisp’s barrier.
Her unicorn cousin grunted with effort, but in the end, the spell was maintained long enough for the fire to burn itself out. She felt the weight of one of her friends leave her back. Then the weight of the other.
Soon it was just Smarty Pants on the last remaining bean bag. She wondered, for the second time that morning, if it would be safer to call off this whole ‘Princess’s Pupil’ thing and head home to work her mom’s shoe store in Farrington.
Safer? Yes. But not nearly as much fun, she decided with a curt nod.
Somepony tapped Smarty Pants on her no longer twitching shoulder and she looked over to see Honeycrisp staring beyond the light brown earthpony’s flank. She turned around and saw an open door that stood alone in the emptiness.
It lead into a modest looking cottage and the tickling breeze from beyond smelled of autumn in the woods and brewing tea.
Though she had already pieced together what came next, Smarty Pants couldn’t help but wince when she saw the forms of three confused mares standing aghast on the other side. On one of the faces beyond the door, the quizzical look of uncomfortable concern melted away into the broad grin of unfettered excitement.
“You’re from the FUTURE?!” shouted a positively perky Pinkie Pie.