Chapter 8
I sat on my throne in the center of my new and improved Ponyville. I could tell that the Bearers of Harmony were approaching. I could also tell that, somehow, they had muddled through and regained their true selves. Good for them. Maybe Celestia's little trick with the letters had borne fruit after all. Whatever. It didn't matter to me, but I had appearances to keep up, so I played along with the charade.
"HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!" I laughed. I created a glass from nothing and held it underneath a nearby chocolate rain cloud. "Chaos is a wonderful, wonderful thing!" I said loudly, knowing that the Bearers were within earshot.
"NOT! As wonderful! As friendship!" came the voice of Twilight Sparkle. She and her friends struck dramatic poses as they confronted me. Snore.
"Ugh. This again?" I said, letting a bit of the true apathy that I felt bleed through. I held the glass of chocolate milk up to my lips and then I drank the glass! I tossed the solid chunk of milk over my shoulder, where it caused an explosion somewhere behind me. Yes, yes, very silly, I know, but these ponies expected silly, so that's what I gave them. They wouldn't have recognized true chaos if it came up and bit them in the cutie mark.
"That's raht!" said Applejack, in that ever so charming accent of hers. "Ya couldn't break apart our friendship fer long!"
"Oh, Applejack, don't lie to me," I said, as I telekinetically grabbed her Element of Harmony necklace (funny how Celestia and Luna or their mother hadn't needed to bother with such gaudy things) and dragged her through the air toward me. "I'm the one who made you a liar." With a melodramatically fiendish look on my face, I grabbed the necklaces of the other four ponies while Twilight Sparkle merely watched with that doltish 'oh dear me what do I do now?' look on her face. "Will you ever learn?"
With the five other Bearers floating directly in front of me, conveniently in a pentagram formation (now why had I done that, how thoughtless of me), Twilight Sparkle nearly popped a vein trying to do a simple teleport and then reappeared in their midst, forming a pink bubble around them as she did so. I resisted the urge to pop it with one of my eagle talons. Instead, I merely narrowed my eyes and watched as she floated them away from me and safely back to the ground. The ground within the bubble changed back to normal grass. A good sign for them, I suppose. Yay.
"I'll tell you what we've learned, Discord!" she said, oh so haughtily. Oh I'm sure she would tell me. The desire to snap her pitiful psyche like a twig briefly rose up within me again, but I fought it back down. I still had a role to play here, so I merely flashed her the goofiest smile I could manage as she prattled on. "We've learned that friendship isn't always easy. But there's no doubt it's worth fighting for!" Imagine that! What a revelation, and a shockingly hard won bit of wisdom on her part! And it's not like she hadn't presumably already learned this lesson several times before, right? I mean, really, wow. Just… wow. Celestia was clearly losing her touch as a teacher. Either that or Twilight Sparkle was just completely straight up retarded. Maybe a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B.
"Ooogh, gag!" I said, getting right up in her stupid, ugly face. "Fine. Go ahead. Try and use your little Elements. Friend me. Just make it quick." Okay, I'll admit, I'm not the best actor in the universe. Sue me. I teleported back to my throne as some pigs flew by in the background. "I'm missing some excellent chaos here."
"All right, ladies!" said Twilight. "Let's show him what friendship can do!" The smug look on her face made me want to just teleport her into the galley of a Klingon Bird of Prey and be done with it. Hmm, do Klingon warships even have galleys? Meh, well, wherever it is that they keep their gagh or their blood pie or whatever other ghastly things they eat. I'd like to see her friendship her way out of that one. If she was very lucky, they'd probably just treat her like an overgrown Tribble and merely vaporize her on sight. I didn't care to dwell on what would happen to her if she were not very lucky.
"Waitwaitwait!" said Pinkie Pie. The others looked over at her as she stood beneath one of my chocomilk clouds, front legs raised, mouth open, and gargling as much of it down as she could while she still had the chance. Oh, Pinkamena Diane Pie… if we'd only met in another time and place, we would no doubt have been the very best of friends, and I do mean that sincerely. It made me almost sad to think about the what ifs and the might have beens. She cheerfully hopped back to her friends and immediately broke into a terrifyingly intense growly face. Twilight starting doing her little magic thing again, and they got all glowy and whatnot.
I yawned.
Each gem on their various pieces of tawdry jewelry began to glow in turn.
"Huh? What's this?" I tried my very best to look surprised and a bit scared as red lightning bolts and pink butterflies and orange stars and yellow moons and green clovers and blue diamonds and purple horseshoes and whatever else started flying past my head. They were straining their little hearts out, the poor dears. It was so very precious. This was taxing my acting abilities to their utmost limits, I assure you. It's not like I couldn't have just teleported out of the way at any point during the whole thing. "No!" I said, as Twilight opened her eyes, displaying that same freakish whiteness that Celestia and Luna had so very many centuries ago. That vainglorious little smile was still on her face, even then. I do have to admit, though, the little rainbow shockwave was rather cute. I suppose that was Rainbow Dash's contribution.
So, you know how it went from there. The big silly rainbow beam shot up into the air, and I had to pretend to be terrified as it came down and enveloped me. Seriously, I had to reduce my power to almost nothing at all, just to get the petrification process to even start. It was that pathetically weak. It shamed me to even have to let this happen to me again, this time of my own accord…
But if this is what it took for my dear Celestia to be happy, then so be it.
"Oooh, we're finally getting to the good part!" Q said, almost physically hopping up and down in anticipation.
"Yes," I said, not even trying to hide my utter boredom. "This is when you made your spectacular appearance."
"Woo!" he said, pumping his fist in the air.
Just as the petrification process reached my neck, time stopped altogether. I stopped my fake screaming and looked around in confusion. Well, tried to look around anyway. My roughly 95% complete petrification made that somewhat difficult. Anyway, Twilight Sparkle and her friends were frozen in place, the very energy that was previously crackling around them before was now utterly motionless. This, I had to admit, was a bit of surprise.
"What's so surprising about it?" said a voice from nearby.
What the…?
"Come on, Q, non-linear beings, remember?" The owner of the voice walked around from behind me and then stopped. He stood about halfway between me and the Bearers of Harmony. He was an Earth pony, his fur a dull gray, and his mane and tail a moderately cropped dirty, sandy blonde color. On his flanks, of course, rested his cutie mark, which was a simple green letter "Q".
"Tada!" he said. He then looked down at himself, and muttered, "Ugh, these colors look just as tacky on a pony as they do on a human."
"Oh, it's you," I said. "I should have known."
"Well, you're the one telling me this story, remember?" he said. "So, yeah, you should have known. Anyway, you know why I'm here, I'm sure."
"Yes, of course," I said, "but for the sake of exposition, please enlighten me."
"Well, this seems like a selfless act to me, Q," he said. "A pretty crappy one, mind you, but a selfless act, nonetheless."
"So what?" I said. "Are you here to taunt me because I happen to love…?" again, I surprised even myself when I actually said it out loud "…a pony and want to do right by her, finally?" I moved my mouth around and repeated the word "love" a few more times, as if I were trying some kind of horrifyingly exotic food like gagh or something for the first time. I seriously thought that this "love" thing deserved a bit more focused study on my part in the near future. I was woefully underequipped to understand it, even as I apparently felt it.
"Of course not, Q," said Q. "What you are doing here is a noble thing. Kind of. Maybe? I don't know. The ponies here, of course, will never know of your sacrifice. And, to be honest, I personally kind of do think it's hilariously humiliating, but the Continuum seems to think you've finally learned your lesson."
"And what lesson is that, pray tell?" I said.
"Simply put: 'Don't be a dick,'" said Q. "Is that how the humans say it?"
"That's twice now that you've mentioned humans. What do humans have to do with this?" I asked, tilting my head to the side. Or well, at least tilting my eyes to the side anyway, since my head was currently half transformed into stone.
"The Continuum thinks your existence as it has been for the past few eons has, let's say, lacked a certain amount of structure," said the Q pony. "And never call me 'the Q pony' ever again, got it?" he added.
"Er, sorry," I said. "You were saying?"
"We have a little job for you," said the Q p… I mean, Q. Just Q. "That's better."
"A job? What sort of job?" I said.
"Well, it certainly pays better than spending the rest of eternity trapped in stone," he said, looking me up and down. "How did you stand that for several thousand years anyway?"
"As I already told you back on the Enterprise," I said, "I was able to endure it because, at the time at least, my dear Celestia still didn't completely hate my guts, apparently, and she deigned to still talk to me. You just can't know how much I truly miss it."
"You know, I still don't think she absolutely hates you, even now and despite every deplorable thing you have inflicted upon her. Must be a real masochist, that one," said Q.
"You really think so?" I said, a bit of hopefulness bleeding through my attempt at sarcasm even so.
"Do I really think she's a masochist?" he asked, tilting his head to the side and raising an eyebrow.
"No, not that, the first part," I said.
"Maybe, who knows?" he said with a shrug. "Perhaps you should come back in a few million years and find out, after she's had a chance to cool off some. Anyway, stop distracting me! I was telling you about your new job. Right, so the humans have achieved interstellar flight."
"Really?" I said, rather intrigued despite myself. "Last time I checked in on them, they were still beating each other over the heads with large bones."
"Yeah, they've only had it for a couple hundred years," said Q. "As you well know, the Continuum has long harbored a very special interest in this particular species, and they feel the time has come for them to be… tested."
"And you come to me?" I asked, incredulously. "After you just had me spend however many thousands of years trapped in solid rock for doing the very same thing to these ponies?"
"Q, we want you to test the humans," said the hideous gray Earth pony. "Not drive them insane. Just a few hoops to jump through, maybe some multiple choice questions, that sort of thing. And just so you know, I'm going to let that 'hideous' comment slide, just this once. Mainly because I entirely agree with you. Guh."
"Well… okay," I said. "I suppose it beats lying around here for another few millennia. It would be easy enough to leave this physical form behind, so that those bumbling ponies over there think they actually managed to win. So, when do I start?"
"That's the spirit!" he said. "How about now? Right away! The very flagship of the Federation is on its way to Farpoint Station as we speak."
"Farpoint Station?" I asked. "Is that the one with the huge alien being trapped in the-"
"Sssh sssh!" said Q, wagging a hoof. "Ix-nay on the oilers-spay! You are not to tell the humans about that. They need to find out on their own. It'll be part of the test."
"Well," I said, glancing down at my almost completely petrified body. "I guess I'm pretty much done here, it seems. Let's get going then." I gave one last look over at Twilight Sparkle and her friends. It left a sour taste in my mouth to let such a ragtag bunch of buffoons think that they had actually legitimately defeated me, but oh well.
As Q and I teleported away, time resumed in Equestria and the empty husk that used to be my physical form completed its transformation into stone. The dome of energy expanded and encompassed all of Equestria, undoing all of the things that I had changed in the short time I'd been back again.
In the personal chambers of Princess Celestia, the two pony sisters suddenly stopped slap-fighting each other and looked around in confusion and no small amount of embarrassment and shame. Celestia and Luna both fully remembered what had been said in the brief time that they had been Discord'd. They looked at each other, both of them tearing up again, and then they hugged. It would take some time for things to return to normal, but neither of them was going to make that process any more difficult than it had to be.
While still embracing her sister, Celestia looked toward the ceiling, not really seeing it but instead imagining the night time sky and the stars beyond. As she did so, she felt a sense of profound loss, and another tear slid down her cheek at the thought. I'm not entirely sure how it was possible, but I got the distinct impression that she actually somehow sensed that I was no longer on the planet anymore, and that this is what was making her sad, even despite every horrible thing that I had done to her and her ponies. I wanted to skip out on my job before I had even started it and rush back to her side, but… no. That's not what a good little Q would do, now is it?
"And that," said Q, "was the story of how I got my cutie mark!"
"Ha," I said, completely deadpan. "Ha."
"So… what are you going to do now?" he asked. He stood up and then stretched, as though he'd been sitting on the drab hull of the Enterprise for a very long time, even though it hadn't been more than just a few hours at most.
"I haven't decided yet," I said, when he returned to my side. "There's the whole thing with Lwaxana coming up soon, but I… really want to put that off as long as I can. I'm also thinking of doing some kind of Robin Hood thing for the command crew of the Enterprise a bit later. That's when and where I meet Vash for the first time, you know. In any case, I kind of want to study this 'love' thing some more, so maybe I can use both of those events to further that cause. Besides, I think I'm going to need whatever knowledge I can glean before my dealings with Janeway later."
"Sure," said Q. "But I'm talking about right now, though. You've got some time to kill. Why don't you… you know… go pay her a little visit?"
"Who? Are you talking about Celestia?" I asked, raising my eyebrows in surprise.
"Sure? Why not?" he said. "What harm could it do? Wait… don't answer that."
"I don't dare show my face there again, especially so soon after, well, you know," I said.
"I don't mean show up as Discord," he said. "Though that could always be in the cards for the future, perhaps. No, I mean show up as your normal charming self (ugh, I can't believe I actually said that). Or, at least, the pony equivalent thereof, anyway, and as a member of the Q Continuum, and not some crazy deformed dragon pony thing. I still don't get why you didn't tell her from the beginning what you were."
"I just didn't feel like it. It didn't seem right at the time, somehow," I said.
"Whatever you say," he said.
"You know what?" I said, the beginnings of a grin starting to build on my currently human face. "Maybe I will."
"That's the Q I know," said Q. "Go get 'er, tiger! Just don't make a complete hash of it this time, if you please."
"And maybe I should bring a few friends along as well," I said, my grin getting bolder. "It would be so very easy to knock this ship off course and then lock it into orbit over a certain planet filled with candy colored ponies. Oh, the look on Jean-Luc's face… Ooh, ooh, and can you just imagine Worf's reaction to one of Pinkie Pie's parties? It would be glorious! And I think Data and Fluttershy would get along great together. And you know Twilight Sparkle would kill to get access to the Enterprise library computers, once she learned about them."
"Q," he said, warningly.
"Just kidding," I said, holding up a hand and then placing it over my heart. Behind my back, I crossed the fingers on my other hand.
The End
Also LikedSimilarAuthor
- Kane Magus · 100k words · 280 8 · 7k views
- Kane Magus · 103k words · 108 5 · 3.5k views
- Midnight Sprint · 26k words · 53 4 · 2k views
- Twi-Fi · 9.3k words · 28 3 · 1.4k views
- Blue Fire · 8.8k words · 83 12 · 2.9k views
- Drefsab · 20k words · 62 3 · 858 views
- ZoidbergIsBestPony · 64k words · 152 11 · 3.6k views
- firelordzx5 · 52k words · 76 13 · 2.7k views
Stats
Page generated in 0.115 seconds
Total duration
1,049 users online
1,837,129 hits today, 2,244,100 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
I require Celestia's reaction to Q acting as Q as a Pony, although there are already 2 other MLP/TNG I got tracked, they prob. don't have Q
omg best fic ever you need to do a sequel i will help you i am well versed in all things Q and tng
Q! Get your trollface on and start knocking out some thrusters, IT'S SEQUEL TIME! >:D
...I thought of this sentence and couldn't help but comment it.
I can wait for a sequel though..... to an extent.
In most cases, I would disagree. I would prefer a cliff hanger or unfinished story so long as the author is able to continue it. I demand the unfinished SeQuel!
Oh, and Brilliant Crossover. It must be canon!
I absolutely loved it. The Discord/Celestia pairing had me iffy at the start, but you did good man, you did good. I mentally read most of it in John de Lancie's voice, it was marvelous.
My thoughts on reading your authors notes:
Ah, yes, ok, well thats all nice then. Oh, no sequal, dang, oh, well that makes sense if he's not feeling up to it, oh well, good read non the less.
>already over 22,000 words into the sequel
*facepalm* (literally; I did), Oh you magnificent, literary typing machine, you! Yes, I too hate getting hooked on unfinished works, huzzah for like-mindedness! If I can wait for [Valve Product Here] installment #3 then I can wait for this!
>bad news/good news
Oh god no, please don't say it's cancelled, please don't say it's cancelled! Oh. No feature on EQD, well that not so bad. But Why the Hell Not?! It was well written, and the story- oh. Barrier to entry... I guess, well its good that he's taking it the right way and not letting it get him down, but why would you even read something called- oh. He's got that point covered too.
>Speaking of the sequel fic, however, here's the good news
OhmygoshOhmygoshOhmygosh, please say it's- yes! Yes!
I'll proof read it! I can do it! You may also want more then just me, but- but- I Wan't It Now!
Honestly though, I'd be more than happy to pre-read it and try to find and spelling/grammar stuff if you care to send me a copy of what you have!
Just finished reading your fic.....as both a Trekker and a Brony I found your story very enjoyable!
I'm reading the sequel now. 
1107677 "The Mare in the Moon. A myth from olden pony times. A powerful pony who wanted to rule Equestria, defeated by the Elements of Harmony and imprisoned in the moon. Legend has it that on the longest day of the thousandth year, the stars will aid in her escape and she will bring about nighttime eternal."
This was in an old book in Twilight's library in Canterlot. It was a legend that Nightmare Moon would return, meaning that Celestia knew it was going to happen for a while, even if she didn't plan it or intend for it. But it was pretty clear from what happened in the first two episodes of FiM that she did take advantage of this and set that whole Batman Gambit into play. Whether she knowingly intended Twilight and the others to actually heal Luna or was just hoping that they'd re-banish Nightmare Moon... who knows? All that is known is that after a thousand years, Luna came back and was accepted back into pony society. From Discord's perspective, either Luna got off light, or he was punished too severely. Whether he was justified or not (and I'm not saying that I personally agree that Discord is correct or that his beef with Celestia here is legit), he certainly feels that he is. Also, it may not have been entirely clear and if not that's my fault, but Discord was working his mojo on Celestia pretty much from the first moment he appeared in her chambers, which is another reason she wasn't entirely able to counter his arguments at the time. For what it's worth, I did revisit this scene in the sequel fic and I think I had Celestia better defend her side of things in that.
This story was extremely well done. Q's last lines had me thinking of this...
esreality.com/files/placeimages/2011/82292-StarTrek-DejaQ.gif
Yes, extremely well done. So within canon of both shows.
Off to the sequel
Pretty solid story. Might have a lot more likes with more, ahem... less... rustic? Yeah that, with less rustic story cover picture.
I can say that even though this fic is a little aged it is a exultant read.
This was a very well written and heartbreaking fic. Good job.
If I got here from “where nopony has gone before“ then how can that be a sequel to this story if this one is a sequel to that story. You’re like that other author that does the same thing with a trio of stories that form a loop.
10275414
It's not a reference to an episode. It's a reference to one of the novels.
10273650
This, The Quandary of DisQord, is the first fic. Where Nopony Has Gone Before is the direct sequel to this (and Star Trek: Pegasus, what there is of it, is the sequel to that). I'm not sure where the confusion is coming from...
To whom it may concern, Darksymphony777 on Youtube has posted a 27 minute review video of both this fic and its sequel, Where Nopony Has Gone Before. It's a fair review of them, I'd say. I agree with most of the criticisms mentioned there (especially the Doctor Whooves bit).