Play With Me
Chapter 7
You are as dumb as a rock. That fact that you literally are a rock is inconsequential. A tetrahedron-shaped rock should be smarter than this. Especially a rock created by the Lord of Chaos himself! Maybe you should have broken them all a bit more. Maybe then your plan wouldn't be falling apart. That's what you get for impatience, though. You've gleaned from Twilight's memories that Discord fell to overconfidence himself. Stupid master. If he wasn't trapped in stone right now, he would be feeding you plenty of playmates, and you wouldn't have to try and escape your stony prison to free him from his!
Speaking of stony prison, yours is about to be broken in the most incorrect way possible. The purple unicorn has lifted you up with her magic and is preparing to smash you against the ground. You decide to provoke her further. Maybe her logic will override this crazy idea she's gotten.
"Hahahaha! Do you seriously believe that you can even come close to damaging me? Go ahead! Smash me! See if anything happens!" Nope. She's still determined. Well, this sucks.
You are now several pieces of rock that were previously part of a magical tetrahedron. Stupid tetrahedrons. Can't trust 'em one bit.
-
After smashing the tetrahedron against the wall, Twilight sparkle falls to the ground, exhausted. "Rainbow Dash. If I ever mention anything about messing around with ancient polyhedron artifacts, buck me in the head."
Rainbow Dash had taken this opportunity to grab a Daring Do book. She needed some serious escapism at the moment. "Don't worry, Twilight. I will. Vigorously."
Fluttershy was currently leaning against the nearest wall, breathing heavily. "I... normally wouldn't... want to see any... violence between... you two, but... I'd make an... exception for that." Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash both chuckled.
Rainbow flipped through the prologue: everypony knew those were pointless. If something was optional, it meant it wasn't important. "How did you know what to do Twilight? Just a second before you seemed convinced that we shouldn't break it."
"That's just it, Rainbow. It had set up everything to make us want to break it. I recognized that logically, we would be playing right into it's hooves if we broke it. That why I knew we had to break it. It trusted me to behave logically, and to work off of basic assumptions. It wouldn't have planned for me to suddenly throw everything I knew out the window and act in anger. So I did that. I guess I was right."
Fluttershy shuddered. "Unless... we are still inside the game.." Dash slammed her book shut.
"Come on Fluttershy. Nothing strange has happened ever since the artifact reappeared."
"Exactly. The artifact woke us up when it flashed into appearance. It had to cover up the transition from its fake world to the real one somehow, so it pretended that it was teleporting to us. It assumed that we would think we were still in the game when it let us out. That's why it acted the way it did. It could have done any number of reality warping things to influence us at that point. But instead, it only talked to us. It didn't even summon any notes."
Fluttershy looked unconvinced. "But... wouldn't it have realized that you would figure out that you knew it was tricking you?"
"Yes. It planned for me to figure that out. It didn't plan for me to ignore that, though. It assumed that if I figured out that it was clearly tricking me into breaking it, and that it was so obvious that I would know that it was obvious on purpose, that I would assume that he actually didn't want to be broken. A sort of double reverse psychology. The problem is, I let myself fall for it. It didn't expect me to let myself get tricked by something so obvious, after everything else it had put me through. It wanted me to think that I should break it, in the hopes that I wouldn't do what seemed like the right answer. So I did what seemed like the obvious answer, because it's what I wouldn't have done!"
Rainbow rubbed her temples. "This is making my head hurt, Twilight. Did we or did we not beat that thing?"
Twilight giggled and rolled her eyes. "We beat it." She stood and headed toward the kitchen. "I'm going to go get something to drown out the memories of that nightmare. Do either of you-?"
Bother pegasi raised their hooves at once. "Yes please!"
Twilight laughed. "I'm glad things are back to normal." Twilight glanced at the clock. "And it only took the entire day. Wonderful."
-
Discord spent his time as a statue doing a great many things. Most of them were variations of "nothing". For example, just the other day, he had done "nothing whatsoever". Tomorrow he was planning on accomplishing "a grand total of nothing". As for right now, he had just gotten done wishing that he could writhe in pain. He had to settle for just the pain, bit. Apparently somepony had just destroyed one of his toys. It was a shame, really. He had been hoping that this particular toy would be able to free him soon. Oh well, what was another century or two, after all?