A Journey Unthought Of: Revival of Chaos

by Hustlin Tom

Chapter 42 - Council of Harmony

Saturday morning dawned pale and cool. A low lying fog had been allowed to set across Ponyville, which the weather team wouldn’t clear for a few more hours.

“Why am I being brought into this?” Bon Bon asked Fluttershy as they made their way to the library, “I don’t have any special talent to offer here, and I definitely don’t have the qualifications to be on this council!”

“Actually, I feel the same way about myself,” the yellow Pegasus softly replied, “I’m not brave like Rainbow Dash or strong like Applejack, and I’m certainly not as smart as Twilight. Besides being their friend, what could I offer?”

“You’re an Element of Harmony for one thing,” Bon Bon impassively replied, “Why am I special? All I did was make a speech, and now everypony seems to think I have all the answers because I said what they were all thinking in the first place!”

“Maybe they admire you for being brave enough to say it,” Fluttershy said before she offered a reassuring smile, “I know I do!”

“If I’d just kept my head down, I wouldn’t be in this mess,” the candy maker grumbled.

Fluttershy frowned, and began to speak in a disciplinary tone, “Now stop that! Whether you meant it or not, you took this responsibility. We’ll help you shoulder it, but we’re looking to you to help us come to a decision on what we’ll all do. We need somepony else’s point of view to help us get untangled from the mess we’re all in. If you can’t believe in yourself, we’ll believe in you for you!”

The two ponies reached the library door, with Fluttershy entering first to take her seat at the now expanded round table.

Bon Bon looked at the occupants of the chairs surrounding the table. There sat the Elements like she had expected, but there were four others who seemed especially out of place.

“Princess Cadence?!” she exclaimed as she practically threw herself into a bow before her sovereign.

“No, please,” the pink alicorn said in embarrassment, and then motioned for the earth pony to rise, “Don’t feel the need to bow; we’re all equals here.”

As Bon Bon rose, she saw another face she was surprised at the presence of, “Aren’t you Fancy Pants, the Financial Minister?”

“Indeed I am,” the gentlepony said with a tiny smile, who was now quite grateful to have his customary hairstyle and mustache restored to him after his long exile in the Everfree, “It is an exquisite pleasure to meet you at last, Ms. Bon Bon!”

Bon Bon arched an eyebrow as her gaze caught the presence of a velvet colored earth pony, “Cheerilee? What are you doing here?” Before the schoolteacher could reply, Bon Bon’s eyes fell on the last chair occupied by a tan earth pony stallion. She recognized him, and her blood began to boil, “What is he doing here?”

Applejack’s gaze shifted to the stallion, and she had a deep frown on her face, “As much as Ah agree with yer sentiment, Cadence has decided ta vouch for his position at the table. Ah’d like ta point out that Ah did not agree with this decision!”

“I didn’t either!” Rainbow Dash blurted, “I don’t care if he has experience against the Changelings and knows a bunch of science-y schlock! He doesn’t deserve to be here.”

“You need a war-horse if you want to win a war,” the stallion opined coldly, “and I am the only one you have at the moment. Use any modicum of objectivity and you will admit that my presence here is necessary, even if it is unwanted.”

“When you kidnapped me and my friends, was I supposed to look at that objectively?” Bon Bon angrily responded, “When to promote your own agenda, you used us like pawns in your plan that almost cost us all our lives because of your arrogant god complex?”

Bunsen Burner adjusted his glasses lightly, and stood from his seat to approach the candymaker. Although internally she was intimidated, Bon Bon stood her ground and glared at the scientist as he stopped in front of her. He then sighed and lowered his head, “You’re right.”

Everypony’s eyes widened in surprise at this small display of humility, itself a very uncharacteristic admission of his.

“What?” Bon Bon asked in semi-bewilderment.

“You are correct, Ms. Bon Bon,” Bunsen Burner yielded at last, “I had allowed myself to descend into a path that led to fanaticism and suffering, and it nearly was all our undoing. My actions to help this nation now are my attempts to atone for what I’ve done. I will not ask for your forgiveness, but I will tell you I am sorry for my mistreatment of you.” The older stallion then returned to his seat wordlessly.

Bon Bon struggled momentarily with what to do with this confession. Eventually, she slowly approached the only unoccupied seat, and sat down on the soft pillow.

“Sooo,” Twilight began somewhat awkwardly, “do we want to start?”

Everypony nodded their approval.

“First, we need to bring Bon Bon up to speed on everything that has happened,” the librarian declared, “Besides, I think we could all use a refresher to clarify our shared knowledge.”

“Seconded,” Rarity tapped the table with her hoof.

“Thirded!” Pinkie Pie called enthusiastically.

“Alright,” Twilight nodded and then turned to look toward the center of the table, “So, the first thing we know for sure is that after the expulsion of the Changelings from Canterlot, Princess Celestia became sick.”

“Which turned out to be caused by a poison created by the Changelings, and was the means by which their Queen beat her in their short battle,” Fancy Pants added, choosing his words with as much care as he could, “Weeks afterwards, the good Princess succumbed to the poison.”

Twilight was still pained by hearing of her teacher’s death, even after many months. Her ears drooped, and she looked at her forelegs somberly.

“Actually,” Twilight’s ears twitched upon hearing Bunsen Burner’s voice, “While Princess Celestia is ‘gone’, she is not necessarily ‘departed’.”

“Bunsen Burner,” Fancy Pants hissed in agitation.

Twilight looked at the old earth pony in confusion, “What are you saying?”

“There is the slimmest possibility that she is still alive.”

The Elements, Bon Bon, and Cheerilee began spewing a flurry of conservation at this declaration. Fancy Pants glared at his predecessor, which the earth pony ignored. Cadence sighed softly, ruffled her wings nervously, and knocked on the table to call for silence.

Twilight looked at the three ponies with a mixture of indignation and anger, “You knew? You never once thought to tell me?!”

“We didn’t want you to hope without any chance of seeing it rewarded;” Cadence said quietly, “We all knew how much she meant to you. She meant a lot to us as well, but we can’t be sure that she is alive.”

“Alicorn biology is unlike any other race’s,” Bunsen Burner declared, “It is literally impossible to kill one by conventional means.”

“But I saw her turn into a gold cloud of dust and fly into the sky,” Twilight replied in grief, her eyes becoming watery as she spoke.

“What you saw was her shedding her equine exterior. Alicorns are magical dynamos, most being unencumbered by age, weakness, or even full physical forms. Now that she is rid of the Changeling venom corrupting her magic, she will eventually find a way to reconstitute herself. After Princess Luna informed me of these events you both witnessed, she went after our wayward Celestia. I know she won’t rest until her sister is found, and they are safely back here.”

“You shouldn’t have told them,” Fancy Pants said angrily to Bunsen Burner.

“Why?” he asked, “They are Equestria’s defenders. If we deserved to know, so do they; they are not children anymore.”

The two silently exchanged glares before Fancy Pants conceded with an exasperated scoff and a shaking of his head.

“Now we come to the issue of the Solar Empiricists and the Lunar Republicans,” Rarity declared.

“Yes,” Fancy Pants spoke as he aggressively cleaned his monocle with a handkerchief, “While the Changelings are the ones who inspired and helped to create the two movements, both of them are now self-sustained by the animosity and disharmony being created by each other, and seem to be hostile both towards each other and neutral Equestrians.”

“This leads me to believe,” Cheerilee said as she threw her two bits into the conversation, “that Queen Chrysalis has decided to actively sow as much chaos and hatred as possible, so that she and the Hive can feed off of it in place of more positive and more difficult to manufacture emotions like love and happiness. From there, she can destabilize the nation enough to make it a ripe field for harvest, with the Hive living like a parasite on the rest of you without any of you ever knowing it, which will lead to Equestria’s spirit being completely broken and the two sides ready and willing to wage full scale war.”

“I’m sorry,” Bon Bon said as she waved her hooves, “but I still don’t understand: Cheerilee, why are you here? What’s the point of making all these horrible assumptions about the Changelings?”

Cheerilee rested her face on her hoof, and her body was consumed by green fire to reveal her true Changeling nature, “They’re not assumptions: I know the subject matter pretty well.”

Bon Bon jumped to her hooves out of her chair in alarm. Fancy Pants and Cadence, while already having been told, were still shocked by the sudden transformation of the schoolteacher. Bunsen Burner glared and rolled his eyes in disgust, even as he tossed his Auratech visor across the table to Bon Bon, “Before you panic, look through these.”

“She’s a Changeling,” Bon Bon panicked, “Which means-“

“When I took you hostage I placed you under sonic sedation in the RSD facility below Canterlot. There! That’s something we’ve experienced together. Trust me now, and put them on!”

Bon Bon realized that only the real Bunsen Burner would know that, so she put the visor in front of her eyes. Eight swirling blobs of various colors filled her vision, with one bright energetic green one where the Changeling sat. “Apart from Falena here, we’re all ponies,” Bunsen Burner said as he returned to a calmer tone of voice, “She is one of the top lieutenants of the Changeling Hive, and claims to have defected to our side.”

“I don’t ‘claim’ anything,” Cheerilee said as she placed her chitinous forelegs on the table, “While I may not be equine, I believe in what Equestria stands for, and I think the Queen needs to be stopped from harming any more innocents.”

Even though she was now weary of Cheerilee’s more insectoid appearance, she slowly returned to her seat, something she definitely wouldn’t have done in the months before she had met and come to know Adam. Even if she looked decidedly more monstrous in this form, Bon Bon at least figured she owed Cheerilee her ear for a little while.

“Now that we all have the biggest possible understanding of what has happened and what could happen soon, what do we do?” Cadence asked, “Our nation’s destiny now rests on our ten shoulders. What we decide will affect thousands of ponies for years to come: do not decide on a course of action lightly.”

“Before we go any further,” Pinkie Pie said in a rare moment of seriousness, “I think we should take an hour to think on what we’ve all just learned; it’s a lot to digest, and think we could all use the break.”

“Ah second,” Applejack called out.

“Any objections?” Cadence asked to a room that remained silent, “Very well. We will reconvene in one hour.”

Comments

[Hustlin Tom]

3552237
Far too many people forget that Discord is truly random, so I made sure to try and inject as much of that here as possible!

[Alan Smithee]

So how is the cheese industry affected by all this?

[Hustlin Tom]

4133811
Profit margins are down by about 15%. Once the conflict ends, though, there's an expected rebound and surplus growth of 6.7%!