//------------------------------// // Chapter 59 - Queen Chrysalis, Discord, Bunsen Burner, the Maiden // Story: A Journey Unthought Of: Revival of Chaos // by Hustlin Tom //------------------------------// Queen Chrysalis, the true and real one, glided through cracks and joints between the thick carbon steel doors that lead into the large chamber she had waited so long to enter. Her squad of four attending drones followed just after her as they each oozed up from their pools of substance. She slowly approached the statue at the center of the vault. In the days she had been up above in Canterlot masquerading as Princess Cadence she had heard the tales of what this being could do. At the snap of his fingers, order became chaos, nights and days had become mere minutes, and the skies were filled with cotton candy clouds and chocolate rain. Though the thought of Discord’s..proclivities for child-like madness irritated her, she believed that she could find a more effective outlet for his power. All beings had something that they wanted, and this draconequus was no exception. Standing but a few feet away from the figure frozen in solid enchanted rock, she began to speak to it. “I’m sure you can feel it by now,” she began with a smirk, “All the chaos above as my soldiers and enemies battle, as well the havoc spreading across the land, and it is all my doing. I know that the disorder I have caused is enough to break your prison.” She raised her left forehoof to the air in the direction of the statue, and she grimaced madly with anticipation, “Awaken! I call you forth, Discord! Come before me and speak; I command you!” The statue of the immobilized Lord of Chaos did not shudder one bit. It appeared as if the dust that hung in the air had not even been disturbed by the Changeling Queen’s flourished display of drama. She looked up at the statue expectantly for a short while longer, but there was no reaction to her words. Her anger grew, and she continued, “I have spread paranoia and fear to every corner of the world that I could reach, and I have sown war and destruction so that you could be released from your lifeless slumber. Now awaken!” Still the statue did not move. Growling in fury, she fired a burst of her harsh emerald magic at it. When the spell struck the immobile entity, its effect rippled across the surface of the warded stone, but otherwise left no trace of a reaction. “What the hell does it take to wake this blasted creature up?” the Queen furiously muttered to herself. “Perhaps you could try saying ‘Please’?” she heard from behind her. Needing only a flimsy excuse to release her growing anger, Queen Chrysalis almost relished the opportunity to punish one of her underlings. She roared as she began to turn, “I will incinerate whichever one of you said that!” Upon turning fully around, she found herself looking at three normal looking drones. The Changeling closest to her, however, looked different: its compound eyes were replaced by two mismatched in size whose sclera were yellow and whose irises were red. It was also sporting a white tufted goatee and a single fang. The Queen was legitimately stunned to silence for a moment as she looked down at this unusually individual looking drone. “Why are you taking that shape?” she asked in angry confusion as she quickly recovered, though she was still evidently jarred by the surprise before her. The drone shrugged, “I’ve heard imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” before its head transformed into a humorously grotesque impersonation of Queen Chrysalis’ face with large crossed eyes and chubby cheeks, “The likeness is so obvious, it’ll make you speechless!” The Queen could not compute the fact that this drone had so heavy-handedly insulted her, first by taking her visage and then by mocking her with it. Her expression was caught between a cycle of clamping her jaw shut in rage and in opening in sure disbelief, which helped to make her look like she were a fish gasping for water. Her subordinate burst out laughing before a crackling red flash consumed his body, and he transformed into a conglomerate of body parts that matched the statue behind her. “You would not believe the face you’re making,” Discord exclaimed through his now subsiding snickers, “It is absolutely hilarious!” Queen Chrysalis was still mutely struggling with what she should feel at the moment, which gave Discord the excuse to look around. “You know, now that I’m free from this old prison of mine, I almost feel sorry about leaving it behind,” he commented idly as he approached the statue he had once been confined to, still standing in the same pose as it had been for the past several months, “I mean, look at him! He’s such a handsome devil. It would almost be a crime to just leave him here like this!” Discord stroked his prison across its face with almost a loving tenderness of his lion’s paw, and he made exaggerated air kisses to it. Then, with almost a thoughtless whimsy to action, he tapped the statue with one of his other forearm’s talons, and it exploded outward from the point of impact into thousands of tiny pieces. With a deep sigh of satisfaction, Discord pronounced, “Oh, that’s much better!” The blast from the shattering stone was what finally jarred Queen Chrysalis out of her constant loop of confused emotion. “Discord,” she finally announced with a very audible edge in her voice, “I have come to offer you a proposition that I believe we will each find mutually beneficial.” “And just who are you exactly?” the draconequus asked absentmindedly as he stuck a finger in his ear and cleaned out the wax and assorted pebbles lodged there. “Chrysalis: Queen of the Changelings, rightful heir of the Earth, and your savior.” Discord stroked his beard for a moment as he thought hard, “Chris, Chrissy, Christine.” Finally he shrugged and nonchalantly waved his arms in the air, “Never heard of you.” “Oh, but I’ve heard of you,” the Queen countered with charming demeanor, “Your powers are extraordinary! The ponies of this land tremble in fear of you. There’s no being alive who has as great a legacy as you.” “More than you’d believe,” Discord replied as he strolled around the Queen as he stretched his legs, “and while I admit the flattery has a welcome unexpectancy to it, I’m curious to hear what you think you can offer me.” “My hive thrives on the emotions of others, the most powerful of which comes from when we take others’ place,” Queen Chrysalis smiled as she saw she was gaining headway, “The process of integration without suspicion is slow and in need of much planning. If the emotions of others were freely available to us, however, we would no longer have need to hide or fear of running out of food. My race would be the conquerers of a nation!” She stood at her full height and straightened her wings with a small flutter, “My proposal is quite simple: We will allow you to do whatever you wish with the lands of Equestria, but I want you to drive every single one of its citizens insane, making them an easy feast for us. Do what comes naturally to you, Discord, and I will share my world with you. What do you say?” The draconequus leaned back into the air where he sat suspended by nothing. Between his asymmetrical hands spun several small pieces of his former prison, and as he looked at it intently it rapidly morphed into various states of being: butterflies, a candelabra, a stick of bamboo, a coffee machine, oversized bacteria. The Queen’s agitation grew as several more seconds went by with no answer from the strange creature. Her drones behind her began to look at each other in confusion as they expectantly waited for an answer as well. After a full minute had passed she snapped, “Well?” “Hm?” Discord grunted as he looked up, realized that the Changelings were still present, and flatly announced, “Oh, yes. Request denied.” The Queen’s eyes flared with anger, “What?” “You have ears don’t you, Princess Cheese Legs? I’m not helping you,” Discord slapped his palms together, annihilating the bacteria that still remained there in a flash of light, and returned to the ground as he began to stroll away from the Changelings, “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some bedlam that needs attending to.” The draconequus was suddenly stopped by an emerald whip that had wrapped around his cloven hoof. “First,” the Changeling monarch seethed, “you will address me as Queen Chrysalis and Queen Chrysalis only. Second, I’ve created bedlam already in an effort to free you from that accursed prison Twilight Sparkle and her little friends put you in, so you owe me. Third, because you owe me, you will do as I say, or I will put you in a new prison!” She yanked on her whip and spun the chimera around to face her, the act tottering him off balance, “You will yield to me!” Discord froze in midair, his body balanced by an unseen force at almost a 45 degree angle to the floor. His eyes narrowed as he looked down at the one who had dared to lay a grip of any sort on him. “I believe there are some facts we need to straighten out here,” he declared darkly. The emerald whip was consumed by ruby colored flames that erupted from around Discord’s leg and spread along its length up to the handle, and it dissipated into thin air. “You have spread chaos across these lands, but you have done so without any sense of style. There is no artistry to it, no inspiration at all, and I am insulted that you somehow thought it would impress me. It is a disgrace, and it ultimately served no purpose but to sully the canvas I was so patiently waiting to do my work on.” The Lord of Chaos turned and looked across the land of Equestria, his vision piercing through mountains, plains, and skies and murmured, “It is still salvageable though, no thanks to you.” “I don’t care about your stupid ideas of ‘style’ or ‘artistry’-“ the Queen of the Changelings tried to cut in, but Discord roared, “I WASN’T FINISHED SPEAKING!” The draconequus’ visage no longer held any measure of humor or eccentricity: all that was left was darkness and raging fire in his eyes. “You are nothing to me, insect,” he spat, “Nothing but an out of its mind bug with aspirations far too large for it to actually achieve. Do you know why these ponies locked me away? They sensed my power, and they rightly feared me, which you were too stupid to figure out. I am the oldest force in the universe. I was born in the moment before there were moments, at the very beginning of time. I was there when humans first emerged from their pustulent soup billions of years ago. I watched them grow, and learn, and even worship me as gods. But after they trapped me in this wretched, consistent form, I slaughtered them.” The Queen’s eyes glazed over as she began to realize the enormity of just how much she had underestimated this creature, “The humans are extinct? All of them?” He tapped his talons one after another with his thumb for emphasis, “One by one I extinguished their existence, until there were none left. That’s what happens to those who try to treat me like I am a knowable quantity, to make me their plaything, their stooge.” He leaned in close to the Queen’s face and cupped her chin firmly in his lion’s paw. Her guards leapt at him in an attempt to drive him away from her presence. “I am nobody’s stooge,” he whispered furiously, “This is for killing my playmate Celestia.” He snapped his free fingers, and red arcs of light scorched the air. The heavy doors to the Mad Adder’s chamber finally began to open, but not nearly as fast as they needed to. Bunsen Burner, in his sense of dread and desperation, slammed the Mechataur’s large hands through the growing gap and attempted to ram them open. He was met with some small measure of success, and he quickly forced the exo-golem into the chamber. “Oh stars,” he whispered to himself and to the active comm, “We’re too late.” Discord stood near the center of the chamber, his back facing the entrance. Before him stood a small weeping willow; its bark was black and riddled with holes, and its branches were dark blue. Surrounding it were four small dark leaved shrubs, each cut into the image of Discord, and each in its own unique pose. He turned to slowly look at the mechanical behemoth that towered in the doorway to his prison, and suddenly his eyebrow twitched upward in surprise. “Well now,” he thought aloud as he stroked his beard, “You’re something new, but also something familiar.” A smile flickered across his face again, and his attitude returned to a playful state, “Oh I just love a good paradox!” The draconequus raised his paw up at the Mechataur and it glowed with a red light. Before Bunsen Burner could do anything, he was picked up by an invisible force from his pilot’s seat. The force pulled him through the armored plates between him and the outside world like he had suddenly become immaterial. As the old earth pony slowed to a stop in front of the draconequus, Discord asked, “And who exactly are you?” “FIRE!” he bellowed. The Mechataur’s grenade launcher primed and launched a Marigold canister at the two beings before it. Discord looked up at the projectile arcing toward him, and without so much as moving a muscle transmuted it into a harmless beach ball. The inflatable toy drifted serenely to the floor of Discord’s chamber where it spontaneously popped. “ ‘Fire’, hmm?” Discord chuckled, “Such an odd name for a pony. I wonder what your parents were thinking when they named you?” “Forget about me, just attack him!” Bunsen Burner yelled desperately to the Maiden. “I think she knows just how futile that action would be,” Discord commented before he sneered deviously, “Don’t you, Lauren?” There was a deep silence that filled the air with no reaction from within the Mechataur, that is until the loudspeaker turned on. “There’s nothing left that we can do here, Bunsen Burner. This machine needs a pilot with a body and a mind.” the Maiden’s bitter voice filled the chamber, “We don’t present any threat to you, Discord. Release him.” “You…know each other?” the old stallion asked as he tried to turn his head to look back in the Maiden’s direction, but he was forced to look in Discord’s direction instead. “Oh we go way back,” Discord idly mentioned as he drew a claw through the air, ripping the fabric of reality as he did, and opened up a square window across the whole of space and time, “1400 years back actually!” Through his peep hole into the past, Bunsen Burner saw a giant red ball of coalesced energy trapped in a large cylindrical tube. “See, this was me before I was forced into my whole ‘corporeal’ phase. I was just the ambient probability field of this universe before that. Oh, and look over here!” The window’s gaze shifted upward, where Bunsen Burner was astonished to see humans standing on a balcony above the preincarnate Discord, one of which was a red haired female, feverishly scribbling notes in shorthand on her tablet. “There’s your ‘Maiden’, one of my ‘creators’. You looked so fetching back then,” the draconequus quipped, “I imagine everything went downhill, though, after you acquire an inevitable case of ‘death’.” The old stallion silently processed this new information. Discord could be and probably very well was lying, but to what degree? “My daughters stopped you before, and they could again,” the Maiden declared, “And even though neither of them are here, I know Dawn’s students will stand against you, no matter what.” “Speaking of,” Discord turned his attention back to the earth pony in his clutches, “You just reek of Celestia’s influence. Do you mind if I pick your brain for a bit?” Without waiting for a response, Discord took his claws and reached inside Bunsen Burner’s ear. Searching by touch, the draconequus rummaged around the disturbed scientist’s head until he found what he was looking for, and pulled his hand out. A brain sat in the palm of his hand, covered in golden chains of light with a matching padlock that pulsed with magical energy. Bunsen Burner was struggling on how to respond to seeing his own mind outside of his head. He was also struggling to yell at the chimera to give it back. “So, ‘Fire’,” Discord said with a smirk, “Your name is Bunsen Burner. You were born in the small town of Pferdshire, population 53, where you were raised by your well off parents. After you had completed your studies on friendship with dear Princess White Horse, you married your sweetheart Lily Cloverhoof.” Bunsen Burner’s eyes filled with burning rage as he growled, “You don’t deserve to be able to speak her name, you cancer!” The Lord of Chaos didn’t relent, and as he learned more his smile grew bigger, “You lost your best friend and his wife on the same night after you helped them save their daughter, Princess Cadence.” “Don’t you dare say anymore!” the old stallion yelled. “Oh,” Discord exclaimed, which he then followed up with a sinister bout of chuckling, “Ohohohoho! You lost poor Lily too! You watched her die after days of trouble with your one and only child, and neither survived the labor.” “I’ll kill you!” Bunsen Burner at last roared, “I don’t care how far I have to go to do it or how long it takes, I will end you!” Discord looked down at the earth pony’s brain and grinned at his suffering and pain, “And the worst part of it all was that you tried to reach out to Celestia, but she didn’t come in time; not for you or your wife. You went mad, unable to be anything but a rotting vegetable in a sanitarium, until she finally came, all too late. She couldn’t just leave you like that, though; mercifully out of your own mind, unaware of the world around you. She still had need of you, so she put your shattered mind back together with a few improvements.” “Improvements?” the old stallion asked quietly. “She would never do that! Dawn would never be so cruel as to use another person like that,” the Maiden shouted. “Says the woman who abused the trust two earth pony fillies had in her by submitting them to irreversible mutation to try and face me,” Discord replied. When he was met by silence from the Mechataur, he smirked, “Like mother, like daughter.” He continued on as he looked back to the brain in his hand, “The spell linked their minds all those years ago, shoring up this mad pony’s sanity.” Discord flicked at the chains with his claws, “It also left a subconscious bridge between the two of you, passing along all her arrogance, her warrior’s savagery, and her desire to create an ordered utopia of the entire world. Although,” Discord leaned down to whisper in Bunsen Burner’s ear, “after peeking through your head, it seems you tried to go even farther than even she wanted to of your own volition!” Even though Bunsen Burner’s thoughts were clouded from his freshly reopened emotional scars, the tiniest portion of his mind wavered; how many of the decisions he had made in the years after his recovery had been his own? Had Celestia had the power of suggestion over his thoughts? Was he his own pony, or was he just an unconscious accessory to whatever she had wanted him to do to avoid spoiling her image? “I’ve got an idea,” Discord declared as he began to juggled the stallion’s brain in the air, “Here’s something I think you both can appreciate: an experiment. I postulate that if I were to do my usual round of tampering with our little mad pony’s brain, the result would also affect your dear daughter, Lauren.” “Don’t you lay a finger on him!” the Maiden tried to warn, but all three of them knew the threat was empty. “Oh don’t be such a prude. It’s for science after all; meddling with things on the basis of some guesswork. I’d think you revel in this sort of thing.” Discord smiled wickedly before he brought the brain in his hand up to eye level, “Dear Princess Celestia-“ “No!” Bunsen Burner flailed his hooves towards his brain as he tried to snatch it out of the mad chimera’s clutches. Discord tapped it with his lion’s paw, and its healthy pink color began to change to grey. “Gotcha!” He exclaimed with a laugh. Bunsen Burner yelled in frustration as his coat’s colors began to fade and his mind to blur. He realized that he couldn't fight it, and that his rational side was being overcome by an avalanche of memories, the sensations and emotions of which were magnified one hundred fold. He couldn't resist. There was no way to fight. Then he was swallowed up. The process completed, Discord delicately put the stallion’s brain back in his head and affectionately patted him on the head, “Now, off you go! Be everything you aren't.” A flash of burnt red consumed the now corrupted Bunsen Burner, and he disappeared from the room. “Enjoy my topiary garden, by the way,” the draconequus commented to the Maiden as he too teleported away, “It’s not like you can go anywhere in that hunk of metal.” After he had gone, she quickly began to funnel herself out of the cockpit through the tiny gaps between the cockpit and the armor plating outside. Free of the now useless machine, she flew off to find the other half of her particles in Lab 009. The formula that Barrel and she were working on was something they now needed more than ever. Several minutes passed in silence in Discord’s old chamber, then a half hour. In time, though, the weeping willow in the center of the room began to rustle, its fronds blowing in a nonexistent breeze. Two small lumps slowly grew out of its trunk which then split open, revealing two glaring eyes that glowed with bright emerald power. The trunk began to split apart, and its branches began to bend towards the ground as the Queen of the Changelings began to reform herself, her fury burning so hot she thought she could spit it up like vomit.