‘Now where am I?’ I thought to myself as the hallway of a hospital how turns into the halls of Canterlot High, only that I’m walking on the ceiling as the students walk below me.
“Hey, Discord!” I looked up to a student above me, looking at his direction, I found human Discord turning around.
“Stop calling me that,” he said, “It’s just Disc now.”
“Who let you out of the madhouse?”
Mr. Disc’s eyes narrowed, “If you must know, it was Principle Celestia. Now, what do you want?”
“I was just wondering, aren’t ya going to ask your class to paint the whole school again?”
With a “Humph,” he turned around sharply to walk up to a door before entering and slamming it shut. I went up to it; I noticed a sign that, although upside-down, read: “Dr. Foxwit. Psychiatrist & Therapist Ph.D.”
Curious, I jumped up to take hold of the doorframe, and with my magic, opened the door for me to climb in. Once I got inside, the room was right side up. The room was painted a light purple with a few windows, a table with cups, papers, pens and a plaque of the Doctor’s name. Sitting on a chair next to the human Discord in a blue uniform, the kind one would see at hospitals was a human mare in a white coat, holding up a clipboard in one hand and a pencil in the other.
“I can’t say that I’m not surprised that the treatment isn’t working,” the human Doctor said, jotting down a few notes. “Frankly, I don’t know why Dr. Mindweave insists on these techniques, even when they have been out of date with modern practice.”
“I always get headaches when I wake up from them,” Julius commented, “Couldn’t you guys just give my usual prescription of pills?”
“Perhaps we could,” she nodded in thought, “But maybe we could try other things, to see if your past doctors missed something that could be more effective.”
“Like what? Dumping my head first into a bucket of ice water with piranhas swimming around?”
“I mean things that are within reason.”
“Reason?” Julius raised an eyebrow, “Doc, this is a mental hospital, reason doesn’t exist here.”
Clearly ignoring his remark, the Doctor asked, “So, has there anything else that has been happening lately you want to talk about?”
“Oh! I do in fact,” he smiled wickedly, “Have you noticed that Luna is a patient here too?”
What?
“Luna? All I know is she’s new here? Why? Have you met her before?”
“She was my other boss. And the fact she’s here tells me my little revenge has worked.”
“What revenge?”
“To put a long story short Doc, her older sister, Celestia was unfair to me, so I decided to get a bit of payback. I honestly didn’t think it would happen this quick though. He-he. Now knowing that she’s as mad as me, I can help but gloat at what I’ve just accomplished.”
The doctor was just as taken aback as I was, “What did you do?” she asked.
“Tell me something,” Julius sat up, “Have you by any chance read the comic book called, ‘The Killing Joke’? It’s a Batman comic where it focuses on the Joker. Anyway, there’s a part where the villain has his famous monolog. ‘I’ve proved my point,’ he says, ’I’ve demonstrated that there’s no difference between me and everyone else! All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That’s how far the rest of the world is from where I am. Just one bad day.’ Truth be told doc, he is quite right… and at the same time quite wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m saying that, from personal experience, it’s true that it takes a really bad day for a man to go cuckoo, but it doesn’t happen overnight. Ya see, my plan to drive the Vice-Principle nutso was to give her a series of bad days until she cracks. Driving somebody mad isn’t as hard as you doctors make it out to be. A dismissive remark here, a flat tire there, a forgotten invitation on one corner and an important event that nobody remembered in the middle; and what do you have? You get a classic nutcase!” Julius laughed a little.
“Disc,” Doctor Foxwit said in astoundment, “You… You’re responsible for Luna ending up here?”
“No need to thank me for that extra cash in your paycheck,” Julius remarked, “After all, I think there’s so many bad days, so many trials, long periods of neglect, so much of fill in the blank that one could take before they snap. Hey, how did you think I ended up here? Huh?” After a creepy chuckle that he gives from saying that, I decided to keep moving onward.
I tried the windows, to see if I could get them open. When I couldn’t find a latch, I tried to force it open by using my magic. To this, it worked beautifully. On the other side of the open window, I saw in a kind of living room, a human Fluttershy and Mr. Disc playing a board game.
“Go straight to jail and do not collect two-hundred dollars,” Fluttershy said reading from a card.
“Did you hear…” human Discord said before he saw me at the window, “Twilight! Don’t close that window!”
I tilted my head, “Why?”
“Twilight! Is that you?” Fluttershy got up and ran towards the window. “Thank goodness you’re here; we can finally get out now.”
“Huh?”
“Long story short Princess,” the defiantly other Discord we were looking for said, “I and the other Shy got trapped in a mind prison, but now thanks to you, we can bust out of here.” He turned to Fluttershy, “Ladies first,” he said, helping her out of the window.
Once both Fluttershy and Discord hopped out of the window, the three of us agreed that we should start making our way out. But when we opened the door of the doctor’s office, following my line, I noticed something was completely off. For one, the hallways of Canterlot High were I enter the Doctor’s office from was somehow replaced with forest. While the line was still there, instead of a straight line, now it twisted itself among the trees.
“I don’t remember coming by this place,” I told them.
“Oh…” Discord thought aloud in realization. “Now it makes sense.”
“What does?” Fluttershy inquired.
“This is why I got lost,” he said, “Like my mind, his always changes, which means when he does it, the mindscape changes too. No wonder I had a hard time navigating my other self’s mind.”
“M-Maybe we should find our way out quickly,” Fluttershy suggested. When I asked why, she held up her line, and to my amazement, it was cut. “Remember that room that we were trapped in, well when I entered it, the line you said was indestructible was cut. So, if you don’t mind of me asking, could we hurry back before your line gets cut as well?”
I agreed, “Come on, let’s get out of here,” and with that, we start retracing the line, hoping to find our way out. And I hope that Celestia and Applebloom would be able to find their way out as well. "Oh, and by-the-way Discord," I added, "When we get out of here, I think you and Princess Celestia are going to need to have a long talk, especially about Princess Luna."