//------------------------------// // Intermission 3: Collision // Story: The Brass Conspiracy // by MadHighlander //------------------------------// Equulaneum Approximately 2000 years ago Cogspin and his four ‘borrowed’ Everfree guards had been living in the mad remains of Equulaneum for nearly a year, and progress on his project had been agonizingly slow. They had managed to stay under Discord’s radar for the time being by hiding in their current workplace whenever they felt him approach. And one could feel him approach, as well as his equine lieutenant Screwball. Whenever either of them came near, subtle cues appeared that could be appreciated by anypony who remained sane: A stiffening in the air, a sudden flash of color throughout the soft stone walkway, or the sudden certainty that two plus two equaled five. Once the flames of the torches with which they had been illuminating Cogspin’s workspace had turned into solid ice. When Screwball – for it had been she in that instance – had left, the flames melted back into familiar warm, bright tongues. The ‘workspace’ had at one point been a long, narrow tunnel that stretched all the way down a street, behind every building. Cogspin wasn’t sure of its original purpose, only glad that it provided ample space for the construction of his masterwork: a timelock. He had theorised that thaumatically charged crystals could be placed at regular intervals along the alley on the far side of the wall, and then agitated with a mechanical resonance to produce magical effects within the alley. He had yet to test it, mainly because of the sheer size of the undertaking, but now, after a whole year, it had finally reached completion. “Now give that a good shove and we’ll be on our way,” he said to the guards, indicating a set of pistons extending from the opening of the workspace. The guards complied, pushing the metal rods all the way into the space. There was a clicking noise as the intricate clockwork sprung to life, and then silence as the cloaking charms activated, stifling the noise. Cogspin replaced the wall panel and led his guards out of the building and around to the entrance of the alleyway, where sure enough, the nonsensical rotations and psychedelic color schemes had vanished, just as he had arranged the cloak spells to show. “Is it possible?” asked one of the guards. “It is very possible,” answered Cogspin. “This is the culmination of our efforts.” “All the chaos, gone…” said another guard in wonderment. Cogspin hadn’t told his guards the machine’s true purpose – after all, he would need test subjects. He wasn’t willing to try the thing on Discord himself unless it was definitely functional. “Would you like to take a walk in normalcy for a moment?” he asked. The four bat-ponies nodded earnestly. “Well, then go ahead.” He gestured down the alleyway. Sporting broad grins on their faces, the four trotted eagerly towards the alleyway, disappearing in a flash of light only a few steps in. Cogspin grinned. It seemed his theories were spot on indeed. And, as if on cue, he became struck by a sudden, if brief, moment of panic as he wondered why he had two eyes. Responding to the moment of chaos, he withdrew to the edge of the street and hid behind the nearby giant candy cane. As he watched, the Right Hoof of Discord herself, Screwball, descended from the sky on the lift of a propeller beanie that looked too small to carry its own weight, let alone hers. As Cogspin expected, she became immediately enraged at the sight of the suddenly normal alleyway. “What sorcery is this?” she shouted, looking around the street. Cogspin crouched in his hiding place, focussing on the idea of two twos becoming five – on the off chance she could sense his thoughts. Apparently, she couldn’t, and turning around, she galloped determinedly into the alley, vanishing from sight with a flash just as the guards had. Cogspin grinned. And now for the ultimate test of the device’s capabilities, he thought. I must find Discord himself, and lure him here. Rising to his hooves, he galloped off to where the light felt loudest. Meanwhile The Plains of Equulaneum Celestia raised her head towards the city in which she had been born, many centuries past. Had she not been aware of their destination, it would have been utterly unrecognizable. Many of its buildings had sprouted wings – feathered, leathery, and filamentous, sometimes all at once – and begun to fly in a holding pattern around the city. The city itself had detached from the mountain and folded over on itself, so that its steady rotation produced the illusion that it had no upside or underside. Many roads curved up from the surface into huge loops, feats of admittedly magnificent architecture that Celestia knew would be completely impossible in a normal world. Although they had indeed planned to travel to Equulaneum at dawn the day after they had bonded to the Elements, they had reached the borders of the Everfree only to discover that Discord had apparently decided that if he couldn’t control the region, then it would be easier to simply separate it from that which he could, situated as they were on the surface of the moon. Between Celestia and Luna, it had been possible, if difficult, to separate the Everfree from the lunar surface and put it back where it should be; it would have been much worse had the stone had time to bind together. According to Luna’s analysis, the transit had to have happened very recently. In any event, the delicate process of moving the forest and town back into place while still maintaining an atmosphere around it had delayed them a full year. Now, though, the six new Element Bearers (Or rather, the four new Element Bearers, alongside Celestia and Luna) stood on the plains immediately below Equulaneum, on the very edge of the Everfree, preparing to summon Discord down to the ground where the Elements could be used on him. “Is everypony ready?” asked Celestia, to a short chorus of affirmatives. She nodded in response, and released a huge spark from her horn, watching it shoot up into the sky and explode in a burst of color. This was followed by silence, as all motion in Equulaneum froze. A bright light arced up from the castle, flying high over the many buildings, rooted in the ground or otherwise, and came flying down to the plains in front of the six Element bearers, where it revealed itself to be Discord, wearing a garish, reflective white zoot suit and similar fedora with a black band around its rim. “And just who might you be?” he asked, removing the fedora and twirling it around the forefinger of his eagle talon, all the while smirking smugly. “I am Celestia. We are the bearers of the Elements of Harmony, and we have come here to defeat you, Discord.” “Harmony? Ergh. Sounds boring. Are you sure you’d rather not partake in a little chaos?” He snapped a finger, and a nearby flower promptly began actively attempting to extricate itself from the ground. His clothes transformed into a beekeeper’s suit, and a swarm of tiny, multicolored, spherical insects rose out of the ground and buzzed around him. “You get to play with these things!” One of them turned into a frying pan, and Discord grabbed it out of the air, exchanging his beekeeper’s suit for a pair of shutter shades. Another insect transformed into an octopus and landed on his head. “I’m afraid we can’t do that, Discord. Your presence here is an abomination against the laws of harmony, and we will cleanse it from this land.” Discord waved his frying pan and the swarm dispersed. Celestia suspected that she wouldn’t have had the faintest clue exactly what half the things Discord summoned were, were it not for some facet of his magic that made his chaos seem almost normal. “Well, fine, if you want to be that way,” he said, prying the octopus free of his mismatched horns with the frying pan, “I guess I’ll have to find other ways to convince you to see things my way.” He threw the pan and octopus into the brush, which promptly transformed into a stand of lollipops. The smile that had, until that point, been omnipresent on his face vanished instantly, and the shutter shades morphed into the Platinum Crown, now hooked around his warped facsimile of a unicorn horn. He raised both hands, and they became covered in a patina of dark yellow magic. Celestia looked back to the others and nodded. Focussing on their elements, which had been stored in saddlebags until this point, they thought of the friendship with each other that they had forged over sixteen years. As they did, the Elements rose out of their respective saddlebags and formed a ring around their six bearers. Meanwhile, Discord raised his hands, his golden aura of magic forming into an ethereal sphere. He threw his head back and laughed as the Elements formed a ring of rainbow colored energy around the Bearers, and continued to do so as the ring became a wave that washed over Discord, obscuring him and everything nearby in a polychromatic burst. When the colored light cleared, Discord was standing exactly as he had been, completely unmoving. As they watched, a greyish skin formed on the tips of his fingers, spreading across his mismatched hands, his arms, across his ferret body, and up his head and down his legs. His feathery tail was the last thing to go, and it seemed to twitch slightly before being consumed by the grey sheen. The bearers looked on in silence for a moment, before Luna commented, “Well, that was unexpected.” “What happened?” asked Penumbra. Swift hovered hesitantly toward Discord’s immobile form. Slowly, he reached out and prodded it with a hoof. “He’s turned to stone!” “What?” asked Blue Spark incredulously. “Stone. He’s solid granite.” “Interesting,” said Celestia, stepping forward. “This is a vastly different result from the Elements’ last use. I suppose the end result is the same, but I still wonder…” As she spoke, the world began to shift around them. The checkerboard pattern that the ground had taken on began to return to a more uniform green, while the lollipop shrubs shifted back into fiddleheads. In the distance, Equulaneum began to unfold itself, and its roads straightened out, adhering once again to the city’s surface even as the city itself reassembled and lowered itself back onto the mountain. The sky shifted from pink back to blue, and the clouds of cotton candy shrivelled and dispersed. A nearby gigantic gummy bear transformed back into an actual bear and ambled off into the forest. As they watched, several earth ponies pushed their heads up from gopher holes, color slowly flowing back into their coats and manes. Equulaneum Cogspin’s search had led him to a bizarrely looping road from which he could look up at the Plains of Equulaneum below. He had watched Celestia and the ‘element bearers’ walk out from the forest and summon Discord. He had then watched him attempt to engage them in conversation, his attack, their retaliation, and then been stunned by the result. His observation had then been halted by the normalization of the city, which caused him to drop several meters as the laws of physics resumed function. The impact stunned him for a moment, and he woke in the middle of a veritable flood of ponies rushing out towards the plains to meet their savior. Well I’ll be damned. I guess there must have been something to that harmony hokum after all. Dusting himself off, Cogspin joined the crowd leaving the city, practically thousands of ponies crowding the narrow mountain path that led down to the plains. A crowd had already gathered on the plains by the time Cogspin arrived, completely blocking his view of the element bearers, and though the cheering that had nearly deafened him at first had long subsided, he could barely hear anything over the continued muttering of what looked like the entire population of Equulaneum. Pushing his way to the front of the crowd, he finally saw the object of the crowd’s attention: Celestia and Luna, standing in a clear space at the center of the crowd. The other four Element bearers, who he had once called his friends, stood slightly back from the two alicorns. Before them stood a pony that Cogspin recognised as the castle’s elderly earth pony archivist, Scrollwork. He was holding the Platinum Crown in his forehooves, offering it to Celestia. Moments earlier “You have saved us all from a fate worse than death.” The old, blue-coated pony bowed to Celestia. Despite her protestations, Rose, Spark, Swift, and Penumbra had unanimously identified Celestia and Luna as the group’s leaders when asked, and the assembled crowd had run with it. “We are forever in your debt.” “We have done nothing but restore harmony to the land. Repaired an error in the natural order.” “A feat that no other could have accomplished, I’m sure, else it would have been done before now.” The stallion paused, stroking his beard as if considering something. “I think I speak for all here today – and if not I implore everypony to correct me – but if you would accept, this time, I would be honored to once more extend the offer to make you queen of Equulaneum.” This was followed by a cacophony of cheers from the crowd. Celestia’s eyes widened. This was not the first time she had been offered the role of queen – the last time had been exactly 1604 years ago, after the victory of the original Elements of Harmony over King Silver-Blood and Lord Malus. She had refused then – nominating her friend Summer Blossom, Rose’s ancestor, in her place – and she intended to refuse now. “Are there not many, more suitable candidates?” she asked. “What of Prince Cogspin?” The pony – Scrollwork, his name was – inclined his head. “It was not Prince Cogspin who saved Equestria. It was you.” “In that case, what of the nobles behind me? Swift Wind, Rose Blossom, Blue Spark?” She turned to her friends and fellow Element bearers. “Surely they are more suitable than me?” Rose stepped forward. “I don’t believe I am, Celestia. It was you who protected all those you could from Discord, and you who taught us the power of harmony. And it was you who led us back here to free those you couldn’t shelter. I believe that you have not only the inclination to protect the ponies of Equestria, but the power to see it done.” “Not to mention, everypony adores you,” added Swift. Spark and Penumbra nodded. Luna leaned in towards her sister, whispering, “They are correct, you know. All of them. I am at a loss to think of any one pony who would make for a better queen than you.” “Perhaps yourself, sister. It is a moot point, in any case – it wouldn’t be proper for me to bear the Crown. I am not of royal blood any more than yourself.” Turning around to face Scrollwork again, she was surprised to see that he had retrieved the Crown from Discord’s statue and was proffering it to her. “The crown may also be borne by a ruler who is beloved by the people. And never has there been a candidate more so, unless I’m very much mistaken.” The air was still for a moment, as Celestia contemplated the crown. Then it was broken by a shout from the crowd. Everypony’s heads turned towards the source of the noise. To Celestia’s surprise, it was none other than Cogspin himself, forcing his way free of the crowd and up onto the hill where she stood. “Cogspin-” she began. “No!” Cogspin interrupted. “You don’t GET to address me. Was this your plan all along, then, to turn my people against me and then usurp my throne when my back was turned?” His face was beginning to redden from rage. “Well, it won’t work. And when I get on that throne, I’ll see to it that you never so much as see a blade of Equestrian grass again!” He made a grab for the crown in Scrollwork’s hoof, knocking the elderly pony to the ground whilst pushing Celestia away with a burst of magic. Though the magic barely ruffled Celestia’s fur, the response was explosive. The crowd surged in towards Cogspin and pulled him away from Celestia and Scrollwork, the crown rolling out of his hooves and down the slope. Turning from the crown, Celestia saw that the crowd had descended upon Cogspin, burying him under a veritable flood of angry ponies, to a series of dull thuds of hooves hitting flesh. “STOP!” shouted Celestia. The other Element bearers simply watched the spectacle in wide-eyed shock. At Celestia’s word, the crowd parted from Cogspin as he pushed himself shakily up on four hooves. One eye was blackened, and a trail of blood leaked from the corner of his mouth. “I see how it is, then.” He spat a globule of blood onto the grass. “Goodbye, your majesty.” He bowed mockingly, turning away and trotting towards the crowd. “May your reign be a short and unhappy one.” The ponies in the crowd locked forelimbs, attempting to keep Cogspin from leaving. “Cogspin, I-” Cogspin interrupted her a second time. “I have nothing to say to you. Do you intend to let me leave, or keep me here until I waste away?” A tear slipped past Celestia’s practised composure, and she made a decision that she would regret for two millennia. “Allow him to leave.” The crowd parted, and Cogspin trotted resolutely south, looking back only once. “Mark my words,” he said then, “I will make good on my promise, even if it takes me a thousand lifetimes.” And then he was gone. A grey Pegasus with a blond mane approached the hill silently and left the Crown at Celestia’s hooves, before rejoining the crowd. Scrollwork, recovered from his fall, looked on hopefully. Celestia raised the crown to her eyes, contemplating it. After what, to the observing ponies, seemed like an eternity, Celestia announced, for all to hear: “I would not feel right with this crown on my head. That said, since everypony insists on following me, I will lead you to the best of my abilities.” A roar of cheering and stamping of hooves from the crowd almost drowned out what she said next. “But, I will not take a position that I do not believe myself worthy of. If I am to lead you, it will not be as Queen of Equulaneum, but as Princess of New Canterlot. Nor shall I do it alone – my dear sister Luna,” Celestia stepped back and threw a forelimb over her surprised sister’s barrel, “is every bit as capable as myself, and together we will lead our little ponies until such time as somepony worthy of the crown comes forth to claim it.” She handed the Crown to Scrollwork. “Put it in the Archives,” she said quietly. “It will be safe there until it may be claimed.” “All hail Princess Celestia of Equestria!” chanted the crowd. “All hail Princess Luna! Long live the Princesses!”