Chapter 35 - Upgrades, Ponies. Upgrades!
"And next time you want to play at being sick and mortal, you can leave me out of it!"
Her condemnation delivered in suitably dramatic fashion, Twilight turned and strode off in a huff.
As far as huffs went, it wasn’t bad. Good posture, excellent delivery of her finishing comeback. Easily six out of ten. Not bad for someone who didn’t often get upset.
Unfortunately, her dramatic exit lost her points due to the fact that she was on a rocky mesa in the middle of nowhere and would need to keep her huff up for another ten minutes or so before she made it out of sight. Truly a beginner’s mistake.
It took her a solid minute to realize this for herself, followed by another few seconds of amusingly awkward wavering before she remembered that she could teleport back to Ponyville with practically no effort. With a second (and much less impactful) huff, she and Celestia’s candy-colored emergency back-up princess popped away, leaving the god of chaos alone on the outskirts of civilization.
Par for the course, really.
Discord could care less if she felt slighted by his charade. He'd already gotten what he wanted. And amused himself for a few hours poking the limits of her friendship philosophy. To think she’d actually go to the ends of Equestria for a cure. For him! It was a riot! Oh there was so much he could do with that sort of power… but from the glare she’d given him as he’d placed her “proof of friendship” award around her neck, it probably wasn’t a trick he’d be able to get away with a second time.
Once he was alone, he gave himself a full-body shake and the colorful patina of his second ficticious illness of the day flew off and splattered all around. Maybe the chaos-flavored goo might do something to the local wildlife, but if it did, it was hardly his problem.
His prize was still just where Twilight had left it. A titanic flower, its roots still slick with ichor where it’d been bonded to the tatzlwurm that had objected rather strongly to its removal. Its petals wouldn’t cure the ‘blue flu’ he made up, but that wasn’t what he’d wanted it for anyway. A flicker of magic shrunk it to a manageable size and secreted it away in the space between spaces, and he was ready to leave.
It took all the effort of a thought to collapse the probability of himself existing at that particular point in space and uncollapse the probability of existing at a different particular point miles and miles and miles away.
To the chaotically illiterate, he vanished from the wastes in a flash of probabilistic light and appeared from nothing inside Fluttershy's cottage.
He hadn't moved, per say. He'd merely been at one place and unbeen at another. Where they were in relation to one another was irrelevant.
It was a trivial use of unfathomable power. A casual sundering of reality for a petty convenience, easy as breathing (not that he needed to breathe if he didn't feel like it).
But such was the way of things.
When one had the unlimited power of the cosmos at one’s clawtips, even the most fantastical uses of power became dull and trite with time. It was the same problem he had with immortality. Live long enough, and one eventually saw everything. In the face of that, could anyone really blame him for wanting to inject a bit of chaotic color every so often into this world that was like so much bland gray mud?
They did blame him, every time. But that was their fault, not his, for being too small minded to appreciate his vision.
Though things had changed recently. There was something new on the breeze. Strange powers of unknown scope and origin manifesting in a group of ponies with little rhyme or reason? Intriguing. For the first time in a long time, he’d found a unique flash of color that came from somewhere else.
Granted, it wasn’t that colorful. To continue the metaphor, Twilight and her harlequin band of cohorts were like splashes of tan and silver amidst the gray. Different, yes, but still fundamentally not very interesting. So one of them could suddenly build cuckoo clocks like a master craftsman. Boring. Another learned to fight in an instant. Humdrum. The spontaneous birth of a ew runic language? Novel only in the ripples of chaos cast by the suddenness of their arrival.
But Fluttershy… that was a different story entirely.
Among the tan and silver and gray, the power that had meshed itself into her being was a sharp bubble of color-of-cycles-and-spin-and-pressure for which the local language lacked a word. It didn’t fit with the rest of the world. A chess piece on a parcheesi board. There was nothing like it that existed in all of Equestria. Which by proxy, made her the most interesting thing in Equestria.
Her ‘mushroom magic’—as she’d so naively pigeonholed it—was far more interesting and expansive than even she knew.
“Oh! Discord, you’re back!” She smiled at him as she looked up from the mess of scribbled ideas for both botany and cash raising that covered her kitchen table. But behind her bright smile and expressive eyes he could see it; nestled deep in the dimensional depth of her soul, a mesh of strings and chords and information that shifted and folded into itself in a dance of complex dimensions. An impossible knot, even by his measure. “Were you able to find one?”
He reached into the depth of nowhere, briefly made it somewhere, and extracted his hard-conned prize with a chuckle. “Was there ever any doubt? Of course I did. One tatzl flower, freshly harvested.”
Fluttershy squealed as she practically tore it from his paw, inspecting every leaf and petal. “It is. It really is! And it’s definitely a real one, right? Not one you made? That was very important.”
He waved off her concerns. “Yes, yes. One hundred percent Equestrian grown. Not a drop of chaos magic in its make. It should play nice with your fancy recombobulator.”
And hadn't that been a frustrating day, when he learned that anything made by his magic that went through the Horadric Cube turned the results to rainbow-gray sludge. And not even novel sludge, either. Just bland undifferentiated protomatter.
A terrible disappointment all around. Though if it hadn’t been the case, he might have been tempted to spirit the cube away for his own purposes. He’d leave a decent fake in its place, of course. Only fair.
“That’s wonderful!” Fluttershy beamed, before launching into her new ideas for how this latest magical plant might be of use to further enhance Priscilla. Something about its symbiotic nature and the mechanism by which it connected to the wyrm. He wasn’t exactly listening; the details were less important than the results.
Fluttershy was… a curiosity that he found himself having a hard time nailing down his feelings about. The pony herself was, well… she was a doormat. A shy people-pleaser that caved under the slightest social pressure like a house of cards. Nothing worth writing home about. At best she was the vessel that carried around what truly interested him.
…Even if she had been the only one to make him break the rules of his game, last time he made a bid for world domination. The only one with a strength of self strong enough to make him cheat. Not that that intrigued him, of course.
Not to mention how she had been the only one to later extend a hoof in friendship. To look at him as something more than...
It was strange. And not... unpleasant.
Yes, she was a curiosity indeed.
Which was why he couldn't allow her to go to prison for something as banal as not filing proper paperwork. They didn't let you do interesting things in prison (or at least, Celestia hadn't let him do anything interesting during his stint as a garden gnome) and he was invested now in seeing what novel things she would do.
Thus, his current willingness to help her acquire things for her projects. (Though no one said he couldn’t have some fun getting others to do the hard work for him. Tom Sawhorse, eat your heart out.)
Though he did wonder why she didn’t seem to feel the same way.
“Is there a reason you're trying to do this in the hardest way possible?” he asked, interrupting her rambling train of thought about infusions and mushroom supplements.
“What do you mean?”
“All this hard work just to make some pencil-pusher approve your creation. It seems like such a waste of time when it’d be no trouble at all for me to—” He plucked his brain out through his ear and gave it a vigorous scrubbing against a washboard.
“Discord, no! You can't just go around brainwashing ponies!”
“I assure you, I can." It'd be as trivial as anything else and if it kept his latest source of amusement out of prison, so be it.
“I mean it's not nice.”
He shrugged. That caveat of not violating too many social conventions around her was easy to forget, but it really just made things more of a challenge. Mostly in finding her acceptable limits. “There are other ways too. A sudden plague of paperwork-eating armadillos on their offices. Overthrowing the government and simply canceling your debt as the new High Princess. I could even just make the bits for you to pay them off with.” He snapped and fell apart into a mountain of gold coins before melting up back into his usual shape. “There's no need to actually work to earn the money and the inspector's respect.”
She seemed unconvinced, so he played another card, one he was less sure about. “Why, you could even ask your friends for help. I don’t even believe you’ve told them about your current troubles, have you?”
That made her squirm but also, paradoxically, seemed to firm her resolve. "Oh, I couldn't do that. This is my problem to deal with. I wouldn't want to worry them or make them feel obligated to help me. And I can do it on my own. I just need to dig into my savings a bit. And maybe think about charging the hospital a little for my healing food. And maybe have a yard sale. I don't really need all this furniture..." her voice trailed off into worried mutterings as she lost her grip on her scraped together confidence.
And then, just as she was about to dissolve into another panic attack... one of the little curiosities clipped to her mane activated in a flare of foreign magic.
Her breathing steadied. Her shaking stopped. Her eyes shone with a resolution that had nearly failed.
"I want to— I need to do this for myself. To prove that I can. All the time I have to rely on other ponies to help me do things. Sometimes even something as simple as going outside and talking to strangers. It's not nearly as bad as it used to be, but I still have a long way to go. And something like this—even if it's just scraping together enough bits to pay off these fees—it'll be me solving my own problems for once."
She looked very proud of herself, standing much taller than she usually did.
It was too tempting to not burst her bubble.
"And what does that make me then? A very handsome appliance?"
Fluttershy stumbled as her confidence faltered. In an instant she was back to her usual awkward stuttering self. "Well... that is... I mean, you already knew about it from the start." She worried a lock of mane between her hooves as she collapsed inward. "And you volunteered to help..."
The hypocrisy was obvious, though not unexpected. Sometimes ponies could be illogical and make choices that didn't make sense.
It was partially why he stuck around to watch them.
"Indeed I did. But if you're not going to take any of my suggestions to deal with the money problems, you might as well carry on with the plans to improve your perennial progeny."
That brightened her mood immediately. "Right! The tatzlflower! Okay, so the first step is to hybridize it with a mushroom in the cube to make it more compatible with Priscilla’s biology." Her key that-was-and-yet-wasn’t opened her pantry door to a space-between-spaces filled with crystal and paper that somehow evaded his ability to find and access on his own.
As she began her work, a twinkle of something caught Discord's attention in the corner of his eye. Fluttershy didn't react. He doubted she could perceive it, seeing how it was coming from a direction that her language has no word for and her science no concept of.
A tangled knot of power and light, undulating in more dimensions than most could perceive. It was indefinably unique... yet very much like the tangle that currently existed in Fluttershy's soul.
He'd heard that they got new abilities unexpectedly, but this was his first time being present for the event.
And it was going to miss.
Direction was a tricky concept in higher dimensions, but it was obvious the knot of power was aimed elsewhere, ready to sail on by to another destination. Some other pony.
But that wouldn't be any fun.
A light twist of dimensional forces plucked it from its path and sent it sailing towards the oblivious pegasus instead.
It sank into Fluttershy's being without resistance, meshing and entangling itself with the one already present. Forging new connections while still remaining discrete. A marvelous ballet of forces.
As he watched, Discord quickly found himself somewhat less of a pure observer than he'd expected as something rippled through his being. Not just the portion of himself he expressed into three dimensional reality, but his entire Being.
It didn't hurt; it was a shock more than anything. The magical equivalent of a ruler smacked against his knuckles, but with enough strength behind it that All of him felt it.
Whatever force or Being was orchestrating things, its warning was clear. No interfering.
Fluttershy's gasp heralded the end of his unplanned introspection on his place in the cosmic pecking order.
"Oh Discord!" she gleefully cried. "I just got— wow. I didn't know— oh my. I think... I think I'm a doctor now! Heh... heha... Hehahaha-Ha!"
Doctor powers? Not exactly the burst of fresh chaos he'd been hoping for, but he'd take it. And he could appreciate the maniacial giggling. It was almost ironic, in a way, that him faking an illness had directly led to her getting such an ability.
He prepared a snappy repartee... and sneezed.
A terrible heat grew within him like a bottle being filled with disgustingly warm snot. His knees ached. His sinuses burned. One of his legs broke out in a rash.
Oh dear. Perhaps that cosmic chastisement had been laced with a bit of karmic retribution.
"I don't suppose—" he coughed and hacked up a lung "—I don't suppose your new skills would tell you where you could find me a little glass of water?"
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REALLY good job on the latest chapter. Definitely appreciated the effort going into the exchanges, characterizations and future chapter set-up. Really liked Twilight chewing Discord out for his "playing sick" joke before his dialogue with Fluttershy (including the reflections on Fluttershy's depths, the reasons Discord gets bored so easily and the discussion concerning her current legal issues. And Fluttershy got increased medical skills now? Yeah, that's going to be useful.
Definitely looking forward to more of this.
Yeah, the Celestial Forge wasn't prepared for in-universe characters broken enough to directly interact with it.
11506358
hey hey hey stay out of her shed
(Ah, very nice! It's nice to see Fluttershy developing! And give it time Discord, I'm sure the others will receive absolutely insane powers as well!)
I love your depiction of Discord
I have a feeling this Crazed Doctor power was first meant for Pinkie. At least it is a real medical knowledge, not the Time Lord's.
11506582
11506459
Oh boy! Fluttershy is VERY willing to use her new bio-tinker power, unlike Pinkie Pie who "has experience at being crazy" and would've resisted the mental influence of [Crazed Physician].
[Crazed Physician] and [Mushroom Magic] has a lot of synergy and overlap, particularly in regards to healing effects and transformative power-ups.
Am I the only one who immediately thought of The Medic?
11506741
No. You are not. For some reason, I could EASILY see Fluttershy telling Angel "It's filthy in there." and then, when some major villain arrives, saying with a chuckle "Let's go practice medicine."
Heck, I can even see some eventual "Overheal" or "Ubercharge" stuff eventually coming in.
11506719
Come to think about it. I can literally hear Twilight laughing the following day after she hear what happen to Discord after that.
11506459
In a quite literal sense, Discord just snagged Fluttershy a very insane power.
And now he gets to be on the receiving end of it. Karma indeed.
11506582
While these things are rolled randomly, the Author Notes say you are entirely correct. There are so many times that RNGesus has done that to the story that it's actually kind of scary.
11506741
For better or for worse, the series tag says no. (Much like how it specifies that Rarity's namedar comes from Rinnosuke of Touhou "fame" (he's yet to appear in the actual games)).