FOREWORD BY MIKE TEAVEE
Let's hear it for Zontargs! I encouraged him to try his hand at writing one of these, and by Celestia's beard, did he ever come through! With this entry, we now have an official Steakeos trilogy, (two-part duologies always feel like they're missing something, don't they?) Unless other writers would care to pen more Steakeos chapters... which I'm always open to! (If you ARE such a writer, don't hesitate to contact me!)
Contains spoilers up to Chapter 29 of Divided Rainbow. As always, enjoy!
It was a pleasant day in Vanhoover. The breeze was blowing in off the ocean, the birds were singing, and Space Cadet's Speculative Fiction was filled with the scents of the flowers lining the street and the old paper on the shelves. As sole proprietor of my bookstore, I was busy carrying out some important "quality assurance testing" of my stock at the front desk. Passers-by tended to confuse this with "reading during a slow period."
I was being sorely tempted to see how well this particular book could fly when in walked my most eccentric customer. Well, "walked" was a bit of a stretch, truth be told. He was a good three hooves off the floor.
"Discord! Long time no see. Finished off the Haylane you picked up last time?" I asked.
"Ah, Haylane. I'm almost surprised by how many variations on herds one stallion can come up with. It's nice to read somepony who isn't afraid that if he opens his mind, his brain will fall out. But no. Actually, I wanted you to look over something of my own," he said.
If I wasn't so sure that such a thing was impossible, I'd say that Discord looked embarrassed. Then again, this was the Spirit of Chaos. Who knows?
"You, writing speculative fiction? Should I book a rubber room before I hear any more?"
"Oh ha, ha. Actually, it's a collaboration with another pony friend of mine who I'd rather remained anonymous for now. She's not ready to go public with this quite yet, but I'm a bit concerned with the directions some of the characters are taking, and I wanted a second opinion from an open-minded pony, before the story's fully written."
"Well," I said, setting my book down rather more gently than it deserved, "it almost has to be better than this thing. Yours does have a plot to go along with whatever insanity you're trying to sell, yes?"
"Pffft, plot. You know exactly where you can stick that. No, my co-author is in charge of the planning, thank goodness. The short version is this: In a World where stallions outnumber mares, a researcher, Dusk Shine, is given a magical artifact with unknown powers. His ruler, President Solaris, wants him to figure out what it does. Solaris' previous chief researcher, Starpony the Addlepated, had never gotten it to work quite right, but Solaris is quite sure it's important. When Dusk tries it out, however, it scrambles the personalities of several of his friends, which happens to include one of his herd-brothers! Oh, did I mention that one of his mates is an alien? And so the adventure begins..." Discord held out the manuscript with a flourish.
I looked at him incredulously, then remembered that I was dealing with a being who could turn my stock into so much marshmallow fluff. I checked the clock, then reached out gingerly for the rather sizable stack of papers. "Meh, it's nearly closing time anyway. Let's see what you have so far."
* * *
As I put Discord's manuscript down on my counter, I wasn't sure whether to be amazed by the story (what there was of it at this point), or frustrated by the implications. So I went with both.
"Let's get a few things out of the way, before I get to the real problems. First off, most of your characters are rather blatant gender-swapped public figures with the names changed." Discord fixed me with a rather peculiar stare. "Don't look at me like that, I'm not an idiot. You made it work, though. We won't get into the trendy 'swap the gender roles while keeping the biological differences and somehow society turns out the same' nonsense," I said with an eye-roll, "because that sells lately. You still have two big problems."
"Go on," said Discord, sitting back on a floating invisible chair. Or was he just pantomiming?
"Item one: President Solaris' actions currently make no damned sense. I know you're keeping it as some sort of surprise, but his motivations and explanations are currently nonsensical. This damned artifact shuffled his personality around with his brother's, kicked off the bloodiest conflict in recorded history, resulted in a permanent rewiring of his mind, and he doesn't destroy the thing?" I asked, throwing up my hooves in frustration. "Even if Starpony the Addlepated's experiment was meant to solve some mysterious problem in the future, Solaris would be better off getting a team of scientists to start over from the original notes. But no, he gives it to his protégé, with no warning of what he clearly expects will happen, and hopes that poor Dusk can pull his chestnuts out of the fire before they burn. And the rest of poor Herd Thetis? To Tartarus with them, apparently!" At this point I was practically shouting. "No, we'll just make you mind-screw all of your friends and one of your herdmates, without so much as a warning label!"
"Oh, and if you fail? Well, we'll just do what we did last time, and make the change irreversible. It beats the hay out of your best friends going completely homicidal, right? And let's not forget having this self-insert 'Q' re-writing all of reality so that they don't notice that something's wrong. I'm sure you'll get over it. Worst case, we just mind-screw you too, and nobody needs to know what happened. Until next time, obviously, because Solaris clearly doesn't know how to leave well enough alone. Even if he expects to get a fairy-tale utopia full of immortals out of this in the end, he's an ass. If he's aiming lower than that, he's a freaking sociopath. Luna's teats, you'd better address that by the end of the book."
After calming down for a few minutes while Discord muttered something less than complementary-sounding about his co-author, I continued.
"Item two, and we have a serious problem here: you seem to be planning on killing off five major characters at the end of the story."
"Say what?" Discord looked genuinely shocked.
"The Shuffled Five. You're going to kill them to bring back the originals."
"Where in Equestria are you getting this 'killing' bit?"
"Okay, let's back up. Unless you want to open up the can-of-worms argument that an intangible, ineffable 'soul' entirely defines an individual while being completely undetectable and separate from the physical being..."
"Let's not and say we did," Discord diplomatically decided.
"...an individual's 'self' is unquestionably defined by the memories, the personality, and the magic that manifests as a cutie mark. With me so far?"
Discord nodded as if to say: of course. I co-authored this story, after all.
"Right. Now, when Solaris and Artemis were shuffled, it was fairly straightforward. It just mirrored certain traits between the two. Nothing novel. Maybe that's because they were brothers who had lived together for ages. But in this current iteration, in Shuffle Number Two, things are much more complex. The shuffled personalities are combining in ways that produce something more than the sum of the parts, and the memories are entirely new. Even the magic is manifesting in new ways, unless you think either Elusive or Blitz could have come up with the Thundernova on their own?"
"But what about the Original Five?"
"They're still there. Sure, there's two instances of each, due to the Shuffle, but they retain their memories and personalities. We know they're okay, because Thetis spoke with some of them in that Meta-Zone place. But Elusive the Artist, Berry the Salespony, Blitz the Trainer, Applejack the Designer, and Butterscotch the Stand-Up Comedian? Those are new ponies. They have personalities and memories that are far more than simply a mixture of the source materials. They have their own desires and goals that the originals could never have predicted. And if you un-shuffle them, they'll have nowhere to go.
"Solaris may not have realized that this would happen from the beginning, but he knows now. By continuing to push for Dusk to undo the Shuffle, he's... well, I'm not a lawyer, but something between 'conspiracy to commit murder' and 'negligent equicide' times five. And heaven help you if any of the unshuffled herd members figure this out. Particularly Thetis. I mean, she's an alien from a chaotic Tartarus-world run by continuously-warring carnivorous matriarchs, plopped down in this stallion-packed patriarchy of a mirror-Equestria. She's managed to survive torture by demons, wrangle a herd of particularly powerful stallions, handle xenophobes that clearly want to harm her, and adapt fairly well to her love-life and social circle being turned inside-out. If she ever concludes that the President is using her herd, well... I hope his guards' insurance policies are paid up."
Discord let out a weak, uncomfortable-sounding laugh.
"Anyway, Dusk is unstable enough as it is. If he figures out that 'fixing' what he believes is 'his' mistake will result in the deaths of two of his new herdmates, well... I wouldn't want to be on the same continent. And if he realizes that it wasn't his mistake after all, but part of a premeditated plan enacted by Solaris, over Artemis' objections? Now we have an unhinged uber-mage, a previously pacifist master assassin, and an angry alien from a world that weaponized stars. Let's not even get into Dusk's friends and family, or who Artemis might choose to side with, but I wouldn't give you a dried-out horseapple for Solaris' chances. Even if Solaris wins, some version of this mess is going to become public, unless he just has Q brainwash everypony again."
"Well, what about the fail-safe artifact? The one that makes the Shuffle permanent?" Discord asked, sounding hopeful.
"That depends on how exactly it works. We know that it finalizes the link between the new personality and the magic of the cutie mark. But what does it do to the instances of the original personalities? Do they remain just as they are now? I can't see how that would work, especially for the one without the matching cutie mark. But it doesn't simply give over to the other personality, or we'd just have Artemis in Solaris' body now, and vice versa. Does it eliminate the pre-existing personalities as separate entities? Then we've got five or ten deaths, depending on how you want to count the two instances of the originals. It certainly doesn't make things any better, ethically speaking."
I passed the manuscript back to the clearly shaken draconequus.
"Discord, this is beautifully written, but the whole thing makes me want to throw it at the wall out of frustration. Next, you're going to tell me that once Dusk and the rest of the herd somehow pull a solution out of their plots, President Solaris is going to make Dusk, and only Dusk, immortal. Then he'll make up some cockamamie position that gives Dusk more exposure than Artemis, thereby pushing his own brother even further into the background. Which somehow won't make him feel neglected and resentful, even though he was against this whole thing from the start. And of course, Dusk and the rest of his herd are supposed to be just fine with this."
Discord just floated there, looking distinctly green.
"Discord, tell me that's not what you plan to do."
"Well, technically it's my co-author..."
"Get out of my store."