Chapter 6: The Direct Approach
Accelerando
Chapter 6: The Direct Approach
Before anypony had a chance to react, Parula, the cloaked pegasus, began playing the harp with her wingfeathers. As the notes came out in a disturbingly familiar backward way, the air took on a bluish tint, and a spherical shell of charcoal-colored magic sprang into being, centered upon the group.
Actually, as Twilight was very careful to verify, it was centered specifically on Trixie. It included herself, Pinkie Pie, Trixie, Parula, Vinyl Scratch, Spike and Fluttershy, but excluded Vinyl’s fellow musical performers.
Outside of the sphere, Twilight saw that time had ground to a halt. Dimly visible were ponies in the first moments of shock, parents racing to protect the students standing within easy range of the “deranged unicorn’s” magic.
Twilight was well aware of how the other two breeds tended to feel about unicorn magical duels, and it didn’t take an idiot to see Twilight Sparkle and The Great and Powerful Trixie in the same place at the same time and not reach the obvious conclusion about what was going to happen next.
“You will find that you are all immobilized from the neck down,” Trixie said as she strolled between them, a fat smile of satisfaction on her lips. “Do not give me cause to ask Parula to extend that effect to your tongues as well.” She walked right up to her rival’s face and leaned in close, grinning. Judging by her twitching face, Twilight was only just barely holding back on the urge to wipe that smile off with the unicorn equivalent of a lightning bolt. “I suppose, Twilight, that you could get in one good blast right now,” Trixie told her, “before you are frozen up entirely. Assuming I survive, that would free me up to do anything I wanted to do to your friends.” She stepped back and closed her eyes, her head raised high as a target. “Surely you realize that I am completely out of your league now,” she said with utter confidence.
As Trixie had expected, Twilight failed to even try to attack her, instead choosing to look right through her with slightly narrowed eyes.
Vinyl, meanwhile, turned to the still-playing harpist beside her. “You can do all that?” she asked in shock.
Parula opened her mouth to answer, but closed it on seeing Trixie raising a hoof to get her attention.
“There is a good deal that Lux did not care to learn about the abilities she accidentally bestowed upon you, Vinyl Scratch,” Trixie answered. Or Umber, rather, judging from the solid blue eyes and the sudden added resonance in her voice.
With a blink and an annoyed shake of her head, Umber became Trixie once again. “I was getting to that,” she mumbled under her breath. “Well, I suppose it is now obvious to all how we are doing this,” she said calmly. “So let me proceed to the why. You...humiliated me, Twilight Sparkle. ” She proceeded to walk slowly around her rival, her eyes wandering seemingly anywhere but Twilight’s face. “You made me look the fool before a gaggle of inbred country rubes by your use of an over-the-top display of raw magical power. Well now the tables are turned. Your town idiots got my wagon destroyed? Then in return I will destroy your town. You brought my illustrious and storied career to a premature end? Then I will make you my personal slave. At my command, you will perform every demeaning and demoralizing act I tell you to, for the rest of your life. Each time you fail to obey me, each time you so much as think of resisting me—even for a moment—I will demonstrate a new level of cruelty in the ways that I can use my absolute control of Time to hurt your friends.”
“Gee, Trixie,” said Pinkie Pie in what at least appeared to be complete innocence, “if you like Twilight so much, why don’t you give her some flowers instead of making her your slave? Didn’t they teach you about that on Hearts and Hooves Day in Magical Kindergarten?”
Trixie turned away to hide her furious blush. “S-silence her!” she ordered, waving a hoof in Parula’s direction.
Note to self, thought Twilight in annoyance, sit Rainbow Dash down for a long talk about what exactly she thinks is going on between me and Trixie. That’s assuming I remember anything after this dream ends, of course.
After she had composed herself, Trixie whirled around—to best allow her cape to flare behind her—and strode over to the now-frozen Pinkie Pie. With her magic, she tipped the pink pony at a steep angle, then signaled her partner to once again freeze her in place, poised so that she would fall to her side the moment Time was restarted. For good measure, she then poofed an anvil into existence at the exact spot where Pinkie’s head would end up landing. “Something like that, for example,” she said with a smirk.
Twilight stood and thought for a few moments.
Since this was a dream, Twilight realized that Ponyville was pretty much expendable. Vinyl and the other dreamers, on the other hoof, were not—the Dragon Emperor’s spell ensured that whatever harm befell them in a dream affected their sleeping bodies in the real world. It would be very hard to protect all of them in the midst of the chaos generated by destroying the town, which meant that Twilight didn’t want the town to be leveled, no matter how fake it was. Also, it was safe to bet that the Trixie of this dream was the creation of the Dragon Emperor. Or, at the very least, created by Rainbow Dash under the unknowing influence of the Emperor. That meant that playing by her rules would be a very bad thing to do under the circumstances.
“Alright, you win,” Twilight said with a grin. “You can skip destroying Ponyville, and I will become your slave.”
Ah come on, Twilight! You’re ruining all my fun, here!
“Well, I can’t allow that,” said Trixie lightly. “You see,” she explained, “the chaos that will be generated from leveling Ponyville is absolutely vital to our plans. The Princess would never allow her favorite student to just disappear from the face of Equestria without an explanation. Ah, but if the town were to be destroyed in a ‘freak magical accident’...Well, tell me, Miss Sparkle, surely she wouldn’t be too surprised, would she?” Trixie chuckled at her own cleverness.
Twilight’s jaw dropped open in shock at how casually the pony before her was contemplating mass murder.
“Besides, I made a bargain with Umber,” Trixie continued with a pout. “Phenomenal temporal power, in return for the opportunity to kill Lux. So, any questions?”
“I...I...I...” Twilight said, too stunned by Trixie’s plan to be able to speak coherently.
Actually, Twilight was more shocked by how incredibly out of character the Trixie of this dream was. Was Rainbow that hung up over what happened to her at the magic show? she asked herself. And are comic book supervillains really this awful? Or am I facing the Dragon Emperor himself? And if that is the case, how come the character Trixie is playing is so familiar?
“Mother, how could you be a part of something so awful?”
All eyes looked in surprise at Fluttershy.
“Parula is your mother?” asked Spike.
“The earthbound ponies are worthless mewling scum,” growled Parula, her words coming out something like a song as they matched the cadence of her continuing performance. “And Fluttershy here, by deciding to live among them, has proved herself unworthy of the Wheatstraw family name. Just like I always knew she would. You have never failed to live down to the reputation of your Tartarus-destined earth pony father, may his bones petrify in the lands of the dragons! Marrying him was the second-worst mistake of my life, second only to giving birth to you!”
Two things immediately occurred to the ponies hearing this outburst: first, that Parula was a crazypony, and second, that it now became a lot clearer why Fluttershy was as messed up as she was.
Vinyl didn’t know about the others, but she had absolutely no idea if this insane pony before her was truly Fluttershy’s mother, or merely a figment invented by Rainbow Dash.
On the one hoof, she thought, Rainbow has known Fluttershy long enough to have maybe met Parula. On the second hoof, there’s no possible way, Fluttershy being Fluttershy, that she would have told anypony about having a mother straight out of a novel by Kickins, so Rainbow’s the only one who might know for sure. And on the third hoof, I was at Sugarcube Corner on the day that that Rainbow had her Daring Do fanfic reading. Which means that all bets are officially off the table.
“Hey, isn’t ‘Wheatstraw’ an earth pony name?” asked Spike.
For his insolence, he was tossed out of the bubble.
“Everypony knows that ‘wheatstraw’ is the name of one of the colors of the sky during dusk and dawn,” Parula explained, more to the voices in her head than to any actual ponies listening. “It was those mudhooves who stole the name for one of their weeds.”
As she was watching all of this in shocked fascination, Twilight Sparkle noticed Vinyl Scratch’s hoof wobbling slightly as it hovered over the keys of the harpsichord. Twilight nodded to the musician to show that she noticed.
Knowing now that Parula and Trixie’s control of Time was not absolute, Twilight decided to take the Pinkie Pie tack. After theatrically clearing her throat to attract attention, she said, “I’ve got a question: If you’re really the Great and Powerful Trixie, what happened to talking about yourself in the third pony?” She then turned her head and looked at Trixie, her eyes unfocused and her mouth agape.
Trixie facehooved. “That was an act, you sawdust-stuffed imbecile! A part of my stage persona, not who I really am! Although, I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised, considering that nopony else in Hicksville here was able to figure that out, either.”
“So this is about the fact that your magic’s fake, right?” asked Twilight, blinking rapidly and smiling vapidly. “Because, you know, you could be a lot more entertaining if you stuck with the illusions and stopped with the ‘The Great and Pow-er-ful Trixie is the greatest unicorn of ALL TIME’ garbage.” Her impression, while almost perfect, had still managed to sound as dumb as possible.
“You dare to mock me?!” screamed Trixie. “I will make you beg for mercy for your arrogance! And when you come crawling to me on all four knees looking up to me for forgiveness, I will look down at you, and whisper ‘Neigh.’”
~ ~ ~
Vinyl Scratch, seeing that Parula was distracted by the drama, brought her hooves down on the keys to activate her magic, only to discover that the harpsichord made no sound. A few experimental taps confirmed her suspicions: somepony had snapped the steel strings.
So she did the next best thing, and used her magic to chuck a rock at Parula’s wings.
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Poor Spike, always the chew toy, even when he's just a dream figment...
The next best thing yeah...
That cliffhanger is rather nail biting McPoodle, how mean of you!
I wonder who's dream will be visited next... maybe Applejack, she seems to be partially waking up...
Interesting.
It appears that they are in grave enter in two worlds.
Hopefully, they'll prevail.
Awaiting further releases.
Hah!
2600993
Oh! And Bubbles' stuffed animal is a purple octopus named Octi.
Not so coincidentally, purple octopi have shown up twice in my fanfiction for this site so far.
Another BBCode bug. Also a typo ("one").
4252981
Why does it keep doing that?
And fixed.
Ha.