That Which Doesn't Kill You
Well, after half a year skulking in the shadows I finally have a story to post here. This idea has been hovering in my head for some time and was just itching to get out. So no more dilly-dallying, enjoy.
The sea of white vanished, along with her nerves, her feeling, down to the pressure of her weight against her hooves. She would have called it a sense of weightlessness, but in this state, Twilight Sparkle was beyond numb.
The first thing she had laid eyes on—such as they could be called eyes—was the only whiteness that had remained, shaping itself into the Alicorn that had brought her to this state.
“Can you see me? Hear me?”
Twilight nodded, but paused, wondering if that would be clear enough. The ethereal shape mimicking her teacher had not finished coalescing and she didn’t want her doubting. “Yes” she replied.
“Good.” She nodded in turn as at last her features, purple eyes and even her etheric mane and tail coalesced into recognizable shapes, their colors muted against her lighted form.
Astral Projection was not easy, though it hadn’t been a deterrent for Twilight’s fast-learning mind. It took her teacher’s aid, however, to project her mind, along with her own, through the membrane between spaces to somewhere beyond Equestria, beyond the stars, into this place, this...
It was then that Twilight noticed their surroundings.
“What is this place?”
Although she had given voice to her question, Twilight didn’t want the Princess doing all her work for her. Lifeless grey concrete stared back from two tightly packed walls. The corridor was just wide enough for two ponies of Celestia’s size. A string of white lights gazed down onto a floor with a lighter shade than its walls. Only the ceiling, stark white gave any sort of relief to this bland corridor.
“I wish I could answer that, Twilight...” The Princess shook her head. “I haven’t given these humans the attention I probably should have under the circumstances.”
‘Humans,’ Twilight thought. Although she had once tried to warn Celestia of the real danger of a supposed fairy tale, Twilight herself had never considered the possibility the creatures Lyra Heartstrings obsessed over were more than myth: Half-minotaur, half-ape beasts from many a species’ legends.
To the minotaurs, they were hyper-masculine engines of destruction and greed, good only to be slain by a brave warrior. To zebras, they were mysterious beings from beyond the ether, their motives indecipherable and their behavior fickle, capricious and unpredictable. You were just as likely to meet an evil one as good, and even to call them by such labels was hasty and oversimplifying.
And Princess Celestia had prepared her for this endeavor by telling her there was a world with billions of them out there.
...By telling her that she had sent him there.
Here.
Twilight gulped, as much as she could simulate the feeling when her throat was an intangible construct of her mind projected light-years beyond her body.
“You sent the craziest spirit you know...here?”
“Call it ‘poetic justice’, Twilight...” Celestia replied as she picked a direction and turned down the sterile corridor. “Just stripping him of his power wasn’t enough. He had to understand the suffering his antics caused.”
“But why here, specifically?”
“That depends what you mean by ‘here’, Twilight.” Celestia split her attention from her student to look back and forth down the Spartan locale. Apparently she had not expected to end up in this particular place. “As for this world in general, its’ sole sapient occupants are everything he loved and hated in his playthings.”
Twilight nodded. Her mentor had explained that before too. Humans were paradoxical beasts, understanding and craving friendship just as intimately as they clung to hatreds of varied pettiness. Yet even they carved—or sought to carve—a healthy civilization dedicated to perpetuating an ideal that ponies had long since surpassed them in.
Hearing it from Celestia, Twilight wasn’t sure whether to give them her admiration or confusion.
Celestia’s projection was pale, but the colors of her mane and Cutie Mark, however muted, were still distinct from her brilliant form, as was the red glow on her horn.
“I’ve set up the homing spell...” She clarified... “He isn’t far.”
A second numb lump slid down Twilight’s imaginary throat.
The red light pulsed and a streak gently slid off the horn, gliding down to a metal dead end.
No, not a dead end.
A quick trot revealed a door. Smooth, but unwelcoming. Heavy metal with a narrow rectangular window leading to another corridor beyond, and harsh, bold script, black against gray deterred any who might be curious.
HIGH RISK PATIENT WARD
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
Twilight paused long enough to see the Princess not break her stride as her ghostly form passed through the barrier. Simulating a deep breath, Twilight barged through after her.
She stumbled only when a padded form greeted her.
With an eep, Twilight saw the world distort as her concentration broke, only to refocus her magic and see what had startled her. It was tall, with a thick barrel—torso, she corrected herself—supported by two long legs, each somewhat thicker than Celestia’s. Twilight raised her head to see she had only come up to the creature’s chest, and pondered how it could stand so tall without falling over.
The first detail Twilight noticed was thick black padding covering much of the torso. Baggy blue sleeves and pants jutted out from beneath. A glare from a Plexiglas covering obscured the creature’s face—a face directed at the narrow window in the door behind her—while the rest of its head disappeared behind a black helmet.
Her first encounter, and one was towering over her. Menacing, silent...
“You were supposed to be here five minutes ago, Bolton...” grumbled a voice through the helmet before it sank into a seat to Twilight’s left.
Silence...
“Twilight...”
The unicorn’s head shot up. Celestia was already halfway down this new corridor, giving her student a patient but uncharacteristically neutral expression. She did not wait for a confirmation though, instead turning and cantering down the corridor.
Twilight noticed that unlike the last corridor, glass stretched from floor to ceiling off to her left, separated by more columns of hard walls. Turning to her left, she peered through the first massive window.
Paper cluttered the walls, numbers and lettering too small to make out from this distance marked each page. Inside, a creature in some simple orange suit stood with its shoulders slumped, a tired expression on its hairless, domed head. She dared step closer, only to hear a murmur escape its lips.
“Thirty days hath September, April, June and November...” the rest disappeared into incoherent whispers.
The voice, weary but focused was all Twilight needed to hear. It wasn’t him. And he (she assumed the creature was male from the timbre of its voice) probably wouldn’t be one for talking anyway. She quickly trotted along, peering into the neighboring cell. She slowed down her pace as curiosity demanded she get a good look at the second occupant.
The creature in the neighboring cell, like the first one, was bald, though a ring of fur, a goatee, she was certain, surrounded its tiny mouth. It sat on a bed, slouched and its uniform partially removed, leaving bare skin for the world to see. A uselessly thin layer of fur covered its arms and chest but—
That was nothing compared to the tiny dark streaks on its skin, streaks it admired with a perverse grin. And even its tiny eyes betrayed a strong emotion...nostalgia, perhaps?
“...And just who let the barn door open?”
Twilight’s ears perked up, and she shivered. Looking away from the second prisoner, she saw Celestia glare into the third cell.
“I might have known you’d end up like this.” The princess said simply, trying not to show anything yet.
“Oh don’t get snippy with me. Don’t you think I’d make myself more presentable if I knew I was due to meet you again? I haven’t even put on my makeup!”
Twilight took another step forward, but stopped.
Snap
Snap snap snap!
“What the fudge?”
The Draconequus’s fingers snapped, but no cotton candy clowds buzzed to his aid. The dirt path at his feet did not turn to soap. If anything, the deer-legged rabbits were looking shorter than before.
Snap snap snap!
The Elements of Harmony glowed, but soon faded, their wielders relaxing.
“It’s done...” The unicorn at the center of the formation announced.
“Done? But I was just getting started, and in case you haven’t noticed, nothing feels stiff!”
Discord’s fingers snapped again, but a nearby sandbox found the flour lining it turn back into sand. A river filled with shaving cream was soon crystalline, and a pony made of two flanks and two pairs of hind legs suddenly split, leaving a pair of disoriented stallions to collapse dazed but unharmed into the grass.
Discord’s eyes swept the gradually normalizing landscape, and then back to the six mares who had troubled him yet again.
Snap!
Silence. His fingers were too numb.
“Don’t waste your strength Discord!”
Discord and his six nemeses snapped to attention as a brilliant flash turned their vision white, just hiding the pink skies’ return to blue. In their place, Princess Celestia hovered, righteous fury laser-focused on the confused spirit.
“It took some adjustment, but the Elements did exactly what we wanted them to this time.”
Not in the mood for hearing his old foe’s prattle, Discord imagined her mouth gluing itself shut.
But instead of muffled indignation, the Princess continued unhindered.
“Now you’re mortal, just like the rest of my little ponies.”
Discord’s eyebrow rose, but gave her words no thought and scowled as he made a few more clumsy finger snaps with his unused manticore paw
“Yeah yeah, joke’s over, Your Highness.”
With each snap, Discord took the time to contemplate the Princesses words as a diaper failed to materialize on Applejack’s head, a tangerine the size of a house failed to fall on Twilight Sparkle, and failed to turn the cutie marks on Celestia’s flanks into an inferno.
“Um...” It was Fluttershy who was first to break Discord’s rhythmic snapping. “Isn’t that starting to hurt?”
“Shut up! I’m trying to concentrate! Gah!” He spit as he realized the implications of what he said. “You made me complain about not focusing! What did you do to me Celestia?”
“I didn’t want to risk you repeating your games if the seals ever broke Discord, so I decided to follow your lead and change some rules.”
The alicorn hovered to the ground and trotted up to the Spirit of Disharmony. Discord stood his ground but his heart raced. Nopony dared approach him so casually before now.
“All we needed to do was strip you from your connection to the chaos you loved to flaunt. It took me centuries to get it right, and the last time you came out was just before I had finished it.” Her scowl softened, but the frown remained. “Sorry for the extra wait in stone by the way.”
“You stripped me of my WHAT?!” The Draconequus, at a loss for any sort of counter to Celestia’s words, only snapped his fingers harder. He wasn’t even thinking about what each flick of index finger and thumb would do, just something to make sure that insufferable alicorn didn’t crack a smile.
But crack a smile she did.
Then his hands froze, surrounded by a familiar telekinetic aura.
“Like Fluttershy said, you’ll hurt your fingers if you keep trying that.”
“Wait...you can do that now?”
“I can do many things to you now, Discord.” That fleeting smugness left with those words, leaving a hardened glare once more. “Just as you’ve turned my little ponies into your toys, I am free to...‘play’ with you should I so desire.”
Discord tried to strain against the telekinetic lights securing his hands in place, but they remained anchored in space as surely as cement had dried over them. That wasn’t supposed to happen. He was supposed to be doing that. He was supposed to be taunting the Sun Princess. This was all wrong, and not the good kind of wrong!
“I...” Discord looked up from his trapped hands and into the Princess’s glare. “I don’t suppose an ‘I’m sorry’ will suffice?”
“No...” Celestia answered, “Because you won’t be sorry. Right now, or at least once you get out of denial, you’ll only be sorry that you lost your powers.”
The glow around her horn brightened, and soon her eyes shined with the same intensity as her prized sun.
“It’s time you learned a lesson of your own Discord.” The Royal Canterlot Voice rumbled out of the alicorn’s throat. “It’s time you learned the consequences of your chaos!”
The aura encapsulating the serpentine spirit’s hands spread up his arms, and flowed over his being.
“Princess!”
Careful not to break her concentration, Celestia craned her head slowly over her shoulder as Twilight, once a spectator moved forward.
“What are you doing to him now?”
“That is a very good question!” Discord snapped through his panic as the Princess’s aura spread onto his slender torso.
“I’m sending him somewhere where harmony is rare. Somewhere where he’ll be just as helpless as anyone else when chaos strikes.” Celestia turned to glare at the serpentine equine once more, his body now wrapped in a golden glow.
“Maybe then, Discord, maybe if you learn...”
Celestia’s ethereal mane billowed as a white light flashed above Discord’s head, leaving a swirling vortex in its wake.
“If you can survive that world, Discord. If you can weather its miseries...” Although her voice boomed, it sounded softer than ever. A careful listener may just have caught a hint of pity in its reverberations.
“...you may yet learn to treasure Harmony as we do.”
Before he could bring in a rebuttal, Discord could only scream as something in his being twisted, something torn, rearranged. The pain so intense that he didn’t notice the faint jerk as his form rose into the portal.
Twilight, Rainbow Dash and Applejack cringed, Fluttershy sank to the ground and closed her eyes, and Pinkie Pie helpfully covered a grimacing Rarity’s ears as his screams escalated. They still echoed as the portal closed.
“...Turning me into one of these monkeys hurt like a real bastard, you know.”
In the time it took for that memory to replay, Twilight had missed a chunk of her mentor’s conversation with the old foe in the cell. Shaking her head, her astral form mimed a deep breath and trotted forward. If the voice in that cell belonged to whom Twilight thought it did, rationally, she had nothing to fear.
“I may have been feeling spiteful.”
If he was a real threat, he wouldn’t be trapped behind glass and metal bars, would he?
So why did he keep her eyes fixed on Celestia until she was at her side? Why didn’t she look? Why...
“Oh, is it Bring Your Student to Work Day, Princess?”
Twilight did not stiffen. She should have known that if Celestia made her astral form visible to Discord, she’d apply the same rules to Twilight’s projection as well. But that voice, his voice was close, too close.
She pivoted to look at a third creature in an orange jumpsuit.
It wasn’t a draconequus. It was another one of them. Instead of a bald head, a short but dark and raggedy mane spilled across both sides. A slimy tongue glided across thin lips—albeit apparently wider than the mouths of the other two humans she had seen—and two dark sunken eyes focused intently on her.
She shrank as their eyes met.
“Oh don’t give me that look, Sparkle. You’d think you were looking inside an Ursa’s mouth.” He turned to the Princess, leaving Twilight to recompose herself.
“You didn’t turn me into a manticore while we were talking, did you? Pain doesn’t hurt as much as it used to after you, uh...” his eyes rolled ever so slightly upward as he contemplated a proper word “...remodeled me. I just think of you turning me into this...” He emphatically thrust both hands to his chest “...and little things like punches and bruises actually seem like a luxury.”
Twilight looked up to the Princess, her Poker Face firmly set.
“Care to tell me how you ended up in this...prison, Discord?”
“Prison?” Discord—the creature Discord had become—punctuated the word with a low but shrill laugh. “This is an asylum, Princess! I’m here to get better, just like you asked me to.”
“And the ‘High Risk Patients’ sign? What did you do to get such special attention?” Her eyes narrowed.
“Well, that uh, whole learning chaos sucks deal you were hoping for...” his expression turned morose as if to return Celestia’s glare. “...Well, I started to see where you were coming from...” He tapped a pair of spidery fingers against his cheek. “...but it didn’t exactly...pan out as you’d hoped either.”
“I doubt that. You are here to have your madness brought to heel, are you not?”
“That’s what they say, that’s what...they...think...” he nodded, affirming. “...but really, I’m here because I want to be here.” The former draconequus licked his lips once more. “Everyone here is so much more...uh...relatable.”
“What happened?” Twilight forced a snort, as if not to appear frightened any longer. “Did you tell them where you came from?”
It was another thing Celestia had told Twilight regarding humans. Myths went both ways. Unicorns, Pegasi and a sizable chunk of Equestria’s other natives were as much make-believe to them as they were to her. Bafflingly, even the universal force of magic was supposedly absent from this alien world.
Anyone claiming otherwise probably would end up in a crazy house on this planet.
“What? Tell them I came from a land of talking horses? Of course not! I wouldn’t want them thinking I’m crazy now, would I?”
“Perish the thought,” Celestia rolled her eyes.
“Don’t feel bad Celestia, it wasn’t a total write-off.” As if the orange jumpsuit was something fancier, the man that had once been an avatar of chaos adjusted its collar, pacing back and forth as he began to speak in earnest.
“I know you’re all friendship this...” he flicked a hand into the air “...and friendship that...” he flicked another hand. “...and wouldn’t you know it, I’ve made two friends after coming to this city.” He turned to face the two ponies again before a contemplative look crossed his face.
“Okay, one friend I guess. The other is kinda...sorta...” his eyes flew between them, unable to sugarcoat what came next, “...dead...totally not my fault by the way. It was probably for the best though; he was only half the guy he used to be by then. And the other...” He took a deep breath and let loose a disappointed sigh. “Your guess is as good as mine, probably hunched over a bowl of ice cream in a cave somewhere. I don’t think he does much outside of work.”
“Enough games Discord,” the princess snapped, her wings unfurling with her shout. “If you haven’t learned your lesson, then what have you learned?”
Twilight looked between her mentor and Discord. The latter had not even flinched at the outburst. Instead, he produced another shrill giggle, filling the air for an uncomfortable four seconds.
“Well, I was going to send you a letter, but uh...they don’t let me have writing utensils here, except crayons, and that would look just stupid.” His dark eyes brightened, widening as a brilliant idea surfaced in his head.
“Oh, how about this, I’ll dictate.” He turned to the lavender unicorn’s astral avatar and arched his fingers. “Got a parchment and quill on standby because I’ve been wanting to get to this for so, sooo long!”
“Quill? I just got he—”
“My student isn’t your secretary!” Celestia huffed.
“Look,” he raised a pair of placating hands to both of them. “Hate to rush you, but while it’s fresh...you know what, just memorize it. Uh...”
His tongue left his mouth a third time, wetting those lips for his letter, and Twilight dared not look away.
“Dear Princess Celestia,” he began, snuffing out another giggle with a snort. “Today I learned...that when life gives you lemons, that you don’t have to stop at making lemonade. Throw lemonade in life’s eyes, kick life in the shins while it’s blind, and then kick life in the ribs while it’s on the floor. Then, when life can barely breathe, you take gasoline—I’ll explain what that is later—toss it around life’s house, and then burn the house down while life is still inside.”
“Discord, that’s enough!”
“I learned that even without my magic, it didn’t spell doom for my...” his eyes closed and he shuddered in ecstasy as the next word left his lips “...chaos...” He blinked as he recovered from the spell. “...You taught me how to treat my...chaos...like art. And like a good—a great artist—I learned that it’s all about doing more with less.”
“What did you DO?!” The Royal Canterlot voice thundered as it approached its royal volume.
“These creatures, these...people...too many of them like harmony. They knew the joy of chaos yet rejected it to enjoy creature comforts like air conditioning or Xbox. I...” He at last looked the alicorn directly in the eye. “I just showed them, what they could be...with just a few everyday items and some...pyrophoric theatrics.”
Twilight looked back and forth between the steadily angrier princess and the monster bold enough to look her in the eye after saying all that. After everything he’d been stripped of, Discord still sounded so sure of himself, so smug...
And he continued.
“If you hadn’t dumped me here, the good people of this here city wouldn’t know chaos if it bit them on the ass. You seemed to have such high hopes that they were better than me, despite their...predilictions...I’m happy to disappoint. Your grateful student, Dis—...”
The creature stopped mid-syllable, blinking, eyes twitching as he rethought his conclusion.
“The Artist Formerly Known...as Discord.”
Silence once more.
“...What did you do?”
Now, for whatever reason, the once-animated Discord fell into an unreadable expression of his own.
“Well...I could start In Media Res but that would probably confuse your poor harmonious brain, Princess.”
“Then start from the beginning.”
With that order, Discord marched forward. His height difference with Twilight becoming ever more apparent until his tiny nose was almost brushing the glass.
“Well, I guess I’m not going anywhere, so I guess I can’t excuse myself from skipping anything. Still, now that you’ve both got a good look, I’ll start with what you’re all probably going to ask me first.”
Twilight craned her neck upward—and he craned his neck downward—as the simian face smiled again. A smile too wide.
She gasped when she remembered an earlier observation she made when she first faced him, that he bore a wider maw than his compatriots. She was wrong. His mouth was just as narrow as the last two humans she’d seen.
Most of that smile wasn’t lips.
A fourth time, the slimy bulge of his tongue lingered on its true corners. Once it retreated, the lips closed once more.
With that, the gentle curve of his mouth turned upwards, into the biggest, most perverse smile the unicorn had ever seen.
“...You wanna know how I got these scars?”
And this is a one-shot? Yeah. Sorry about that, but as much fun as it was to write this, all my ideas were hard-pressed to stick ponies in anywhere. It would run into the same problems that some people complained about regarding Anthropology, and though the middle part was probably my favorite (I’m a sucker for fish-out-of-water stories), “WHERE ARE DA PONIES” is probably a legitimate complaint.
So that said, will I continue this? Maybe. For now, I’ll leave it as a one-shot and let the reader’s imagination decide what transpired to get Discord into his pseudo-predicament.
Hope you enjoyed.
P.S. Is it blasphemous that while writing this, I imagined Heath Ledger’s scenes being dubbed over in John De Lancie’s voice?