Final Mission

by Sharp Quill

17. Intriguing Proposition

Lyra dragged a hoof across the dusty floor, adding to the disturbances that were already there.

“There wasn’t much point in giving the place a thorough dusting,” I said.

“Because it’d all return the next morning.” She pointed at the hoof prints I’d left behind. “What about those?”

“That was after I had reversed the spell. I stayed an extra night after that.” I gave a sigh of missed opportunities. “If I had known I had succeeded…”

“You could have come back in time to attend the wedding,” she said, completing my sentence, “maybe even help me finish the decorations.”

I hopped onto the unmade bed. “Instead of lying here on this bed, convinced of the utter hopelessness of my situation.”

She joined me on the bed and laid down beside me. “Are you finally willing to tell me what I did after months of your life had been erased?”

Not particularly.

She looked at me with those eyes.

I sighed. Might as well get it over with.

“Because of some items I had taken and kept with me, you were convinced I had intentionally left you. You sold the house and moved to Canterlot. I don’t think you ever set hoof in Ponyville again.”

“Yeah, I guess I’d do that,” she admitted. “Who bought it?”

“Pinkie Pie, believe it or not.”

“Pinkie?!” Lyra giggled. “How could she afford it?”

“Apparently, you were so motivated to get out of town that you gave her a very good deal. The Cakes helped out too, I guess.”

“Funny how things worked out. What about the store downstairs?”

“She turned it into a bakery specializing in pies. Had some very, uh, creative recipes, too.”

Lyra rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling. “And I had no idea what was happening. It must’ve been incredibly hard on you.”

“Even if I had told you, even if you’d believed me, I’d be back to square one after the next reset.” I gave her a nuzzle. “To be honest, I mostly avoided you once I realized what was happening. I just couldn’t deal with it.”

She rolled upright again, grinning at me. “Look on the bright side: now I do know, and I believe you. So if it happens again, you won’t have to avoid me!”

I looked away from her. “Please, Lyra, don’t even joke about it.”

The room got deathly quiet.

Lyra made her way back onto the floor. She looked at me as if I was a condemned mare.

“They’re not going to use that spell on me again,” I tried to assure her. My words had no effect.

“If… if you had not reversed that spell, would those runes be happening?”

“They are not doing this because of my actions!”

“That isn’t the question I asked.”

Lyra had been told that the ones who had cast that spell on me were also behind those runes, but she had not been told that it was Twilight’s actions that had caused the latter. Even so, I couldn’t deny her point: if I hadn’t reversed the spell, if not for my actions, Twilight would not have done what she did.

“You don’t know what you’re asking of me.”

She moved a bit closer. “As a special agent of The Agency, it was your mission to protect Equestria against the most dangerous of monsters. Each time you did, you ran the risk of paying the ultimate price.” She forced a smile. “Is this really any different? Think of it as your ‘final mission.’”

I couldn’t look at her. “That was before I met you.” I got off on the opposite side of the bed. “We don’t even know that would work.”

“How could it not?” she asked. “The events that caused them to do this would not have happened.”

“They’d still know they did happen, even after they stopped happening.” I shook my head. This temporal stuff sounded like nonsense when expressed in mere words. “You’ll just have to trust me on that.”

“Okay…” Lyra worked her away around to my side of the bed. “Would it hurt to ask them?”

I once more faced her. “You’ll never know I had existed,” I reminded her. “I wouldn’t have even been born as far as Equestria was concerned.”

“Then… you’ll just have to remember for both of us.”

---

It was zap apple season. As I did every year, I made a trip down to Sweet Apple Acres to pick up a few jars, most of which I’d use for zap apple truffles. Lyra accompanied me, as she had nothing else going on at the moment.

We found Applejack in front of the barn, assembling a barrel. “Howdy, Bon Bon! I can guess what yer here for.”

“And you’d be right,” I light-heatedly replied. I’d reserved them two months ago, paying in advance.

The farm pony briefly removed her hat to wipe her brow. “Come this way.”

She took us into the barn and navigated around bales of hay and farm equipment until she reached the entrance to the cellar. She unlocked its door and went inside. The clinking of jars were heard. Applejack came back out with a basket held in her mouth, a basket that held five jars of zap apple jam.

She placed them on the floor in front of me, suddenly giving me an apologetic look. “To be honest, I reckon you might be disappointed with this year’s harvest.”

“What do you mean?”

“The signs were different this year,” she said. “Not as strong as before. Dunno why. The jam isn’t bad, mind you, but it ain’t as good as it ought to be.”

Lyra gave me a certain look; I got the message. I couldn’t put it off forever. A half-year of sky runes had, so far, little impact on our magic, but it was enough to affect an intensely magical crop such as this. How much more time did I have?

“I’d have Twilight investigate this, but, y’know, she’s off in Zebrica on a wild goose chase over those runes.” She looked up at the ceiling, as if the wood was transparent. “Princess Celestia dun think they’re dangerous. If ya ask me, they’re a blessin’. There ain’t been a single monster attack since they showed up.”

---

I found Discord in the living room playing solitaire. Fluttershy hoofed me a glass of lemonade before leaving the room, giving us our privacy.

I didn’t interrupt him at first, curiosity getting the better of me. The card game seemed inappropriate for him, so orderly, so rules-bound. He picked a card off the deck and placed it right where it ought to go. He picked up another card. There were several places it could go; he had to think it over.

A card, already played in the middle of a column, got up, walked two columns over, then inserted itself as the penultimate card of the destination column.

Curiosity got the better of me yet again. “Aren’t the cards supposed to stay put?”

Discord snapped his talons, and all the cards were encased in a single block of crystal, presumably preventing any cards from taking the initiative while his attention was elsewhere. “What’s the fun in that?” he sincerely asked.

“I’ll, uh… I’ll take your word for it.” I went over to a chair and sat down.

I looked at him.

He looked at me.

I sighed. I had to get the ball rolling somehow. “I have something to say you might find quite shocking,” I droned.

“That you’re the secret love child of Princess Celestia and King Apollo?”

“What? No! How do you even come up with something like that?!”

The draconequus shrugged. “Spirit of Chaos?”

Don’t get distracted, I told myself. Steeling myself, I began: “Let’s say I agree to have my existence erased, like before. Then Twilight won’t do what she did to break the rules. Will that give this realm a new lease on life?”

“Intriguing proposition,” he said, stroking his goatee thoughtfully. “They’ll want your full cooperation, naturally.”

“It’s negotiable,” I said equitably enough. “I’d like some assurance that new lease won’t be taken away.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“One possibility would be to destroy those vaults—after the spell has run its course.”

He pulled out a notepad and quill from nowhere. “Anything else?”

“There’s also the matter of when this deal would be consummated. So long as there’s sufficient magic left, would I be right in assuming it doesn’t matter when the spell was cast on me?”

“There needs to be sufficient magic remaining at each reset.”

Oh. Right. And the longer I waited, the longer it’d be before a reset undid Twilight’s actions. “The more time I can have, the likelier I’d be to agree.”

He gave me a raised eyebrow. “You may be overestimating your bargaining position.”

“And I really don’t want to do this,” I retorted. “You don’t remember much of it, but I went through Tartarus to get my life back.”

“Literally?”

I groaned. “No, figuratively. You know what I mean. Whatever.” I collected my thoughts. “Can you pass my offer on to… to whomever it needs to be passed on to?”

“I can,” he confirmed. “Don’t expect an immediate response.”

I didn’t know what I feared more: that they would turn me down, condemning Equestria, or accept, condemning myself. On the face of it, Discord should be right: my bargaining position sucked. If they really wanted to keep this “experiment” going, surely they could have found some other way to deal with it. Why not punish just Twilight?

Yet what Celestia had told me had given me hope that my bargaining position was better than it ought to have been. They wanted to “remain” on my good side? This was the way to do it.

Only time would tell.

---

The appointed hour approached. I put the “closed” sign up on the door and went into the kitchen. As I expected, the Gate opened immediately once they saw me. A familiar lime-green rabbit stood at the threshold.

Beyond stepped aside to let me through. Once I had passed through the Gate, she telekinetically tapped a crystal on the control panel. The violet glow from the Gate’s perimeter went out, yet my kitchen remained visible; the Gate was in view mode.

“You’ve made the right choice,” she told me.

I wasn’t in the mood. “Let’s just get this over with.”

“Right,” she said. “Follow me.”

She led me to a conference room on the third floor. As we entered the room, off to the side I saw Discord casually chatting with a lemur. A rather large lemur, somewhat bigger than a pony, as flawlessly symmetrical as Discord was not, every strand of its purple fur perfectly in place. She didn’t have a horn or wings, but from the way the two were standing next to each other, this lemur was the draconequus’ equal.

“I didn’t expect you to be here,” I said to Discord. When he’d finally gotten back to me a few months later, with the terms for this meeting, he hadn’t mentioned he’d be attending as well.

“I’m here primarily as an observer. I should know what’s going on, assuming we come to an agreement.”

On the bright side, that was evidence they weren’t rejecting my offer out of hoof. The events that take place here in the Nexus, and his memory of them, would remain unaffected by any resets.

“You may call me Order,” the lemur said, her voice serene and composed, with a musicality that would put a harp to shame.

I looked askance at them. “Order? Discord? Am I missing something here?” If there was more than one draconequus, there was undoubtably more than one lemur. These names seemed rather… generic.

“Our true names would be unintelligible to you,” Discord replied, not as a snark or in a demeaning fashion, but as a simple statement of fact.

I pondered the implications of that as I took a seat at the table. Order and Discord took adjacent seats on the opposite side.

“I’ll be waiting in the Gate room,” Beyond said. She left the conference room, closing the door behind her.

Order gave me a gentle smile. “Shall we begin?”

Comments

[Fana Farouche]

“That you’re the secret love child of Princess Celestia and King Apollo?”

Yay! you actually went there! Thank you for this, I've been in a bad mood[1] all day and this makes it better.

[1] I don't know if you're familiar with Mass Effect 3 but I've been playing that for the last few days, and have just got to the bit where I had to choose whether or not to allow Legion to upload the Reaper code to the Geth, if you know the game, you'll doubtless know that Tali'Zorah does not react well to the consequences. My heart is broken, but this helped. So, thank you again.

Returning to the story, Bon Bon seems to be considering a somewhat Faustian deal.

Also, bonus points for the lemur.

[Sharp Quill]

7156504 Yeah, I went there. Discord, that bastard, didn't give me a choice.

[Stonecrop Sedum]

I don't like where this is going. I want to agree with Twilight that they can't play by their rules forever and they have to fight back. Plus it's the only way to save the kitties. Celestia and Apollo seem to disagree, however. Damn...