Discord eyed Swarm from his chocolate milk cloud as the man practiced for the upcoming battle. While the Lord of Chaos watched, the man went from a cross-legged sitting position into an explosive upwards kick, followed with a flurry of punches right at throat level and a haymaker to an invisible assailant behind him, all in the same amount of time most people took to blink. It was the most impressive display of hand-to-hand combat in the known universe. Of course, Discord would rather die than let Swarm know he thought so.

“Let me know when you’re done prancing about,” the Lord of Chaos chided. “I would rather like to take a nap until then.”

“Why should I awake you?” Swarm asked. “So you may annoy me even further?”

“So I AM getting under your skin!” Discord smiled and squeezed a small jet of chocolate milk out of his cloud and directly into his own mouth, smiling cockily. “It seems not even the all-powerful Swarm is immune to my incredible abilities.”

In a split second between shifting his weight from one foot to the next, Swarm flicked his finger in Discord’s direction, instantly transforming his chocolate milk cloud into an iron anvil. The Lord of Chaos promptly fell flat on his face, pinning his tail beneath the anvil while simultaneously cracking his nose against its metal surface. “An anvil!?” He shouted, straightening out his nose. “What, have you watched too many of your brother’s cartoons!?”

“I thought you would like the Warner Brother’s feel to it.” Swarm replied smartly, seguing smoothly from a standing lotus position to a perfectly executed front-kick and back again. Sneering, the Lord of Chaos focused all his magical might into transforming the anvil into a puddle of vegetable oil, which he promptly sent off in Swarm’s direction. In response, a small bubble of dark matter suddenly appeared beneath the man’s feet, barely enough for his big toe to fit on, but still he balanced perfectly. The oil deflected around the bubble, unable to penetrate its meta-universal existence. The entire time, the look of focus and serenity remained completely unchanged on his face.

“You could’ve just sent it back at me,” Discord said dryly.

“I am not one to act in vengeance,” the man replied, switching his balancing point to his other big toe.

“Then what the hell was that Animaniacs bullcrap!?”

“That was a demonstration; nothing more, nothing less.”

“Oh, you’re no fun.” Discord grumbled and retreated to a small stool in the corner to pout. But even the sheer impossibility of there being a corner in a little pocket dimension between worlds composed primarily of exotic matter wasn’t enough to cheer him up. “God, I wish the Yank was here. Or even the Kraut. At least they know how to party.”

“If it is a party you wish for, it is a party you shall soon get.”

Discord rocketed up to the man and growled right in his face. “Was that a threat, boy?”

“Look in the sky, fool.”

Discord looked. His jaw dropped. High above them, a small, green light had appeared with a helicopter at its center. Swarm whipped out his cell phone. “Yeah? Honey, they’re right above us… Okay, just redirect as many portals as you can, close whatever you can’t. We got people on the ground in Equestria that can handle whatever you miss. Okay, sweetheart? Okay.” Then, in a quiet tone, he kissed the speaker and whispered: “Love you,” before flipping the phone shut. By then, Discord had already run off to retrieve the princesses from their time bubble. He could only hope Celestia had prepared her sister for what was to come.

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Luna sat upright as she and her sister hovered in their little time bubble, set aside just for them to have a few moments of privacy. She periodically sipped from her tea cup, grateful for the pot hovering between them. It kept her nerves calm as Celestia continued:

“It started about a year ago: I noticed certain weaknesses developing in certain…places, for lack of a better word.”

“What places would that be, dear sister?” Luna asked, sampling a cracker from the plate hovering by the teapot.

“Oh, just random places. Mostly isolated little spots in the middle of nowhere where the magic seemed to be draining. A bit like water flowing through a crack, but a crack that I could neither see nor feel. Our best unicorns could detect nothing, however, so I dismissed these weaknesses as nothing more than a natural fluctuation in the magical field around Equestria. For weeks, this continued, until about a year ago, when a strange pony appeared at the gates.”

“Strange? How?”

“Well, this pony just felt…off. He carried himself not too unlike that ‘Doctor’ fellow when he first arrived, like he just wasn’t used to walking about in a pony form. He introduced himself as Swarm and immediately called for a royal audience.”

“And you just granted him one?”

“Before the guards turned him away, he named off every one of their dead relatives and their causes of death. That information is only available in the Royal Archives, which are under heavy guard at all times. I figured this pony must have had something interesting to say, if he was able to know so much.”

“And how did that meeting go, sister?”

“It was…interesting, to say the least. Halfway through what I thought was idle conversation about the possible existence of alternate realities and the fundamental basics of the universe, he suddenly asked if he could change into something a bit more comfortable. This puzzled me at first, as like most ponies, he was not clothed, but I granted him permission to do so.”

“Let me guess,” Luna munched on her cracker. “He turned into that humanoid figure we left back there?”

“Actually, the Swarm I met with was Mr. Li’s brother, an American by the name of Michael Sawyer.”

Luna paused in munching her cracker. “Heavens above, Celestia, how many Swarms are there?”

“At my count, there are at least five brothers and one sister who refer to themselves as Swarm. They, in turn, have the ability to create ‘offshoots,’ beings with their likenesses that give each of the six ‘original’ Swarms the ability to operate on multiple worlds at once.”

Luna set her cracker aside, her appetite all but gone now. “They ‘operate’ on multiple worlds?”

“Just to help out, maybe guide them down less-destructive paths, but usually to ensure that periodic fluctuations in time itself do not unleash too much destruction. Think of Swarm as reality’s cleanup crew for quantum fluctuations, ensuring that such do not annihilate entire civilizations and aiding some planets that still manage to be affected.”

Luna rubbed her temples. “He guides entire civilizations down less-destructive paths?”

“That’s more of a hobby than anything. He’s told me himself: he believes a people should be left to build their own world, not let some God step in and force them down a path he thinks might be preferable. But if there could be serious bloodshed…” she shrugged. “He tries to make it more likely for a people to follow a different path, that’s all.”

Luna sat down, pouring herself another cup of tea and staring vacantly into the darkness around them. She spilled a few searing hot-drops onto her leg, but didn’t seem to notice. “So, there’s a girl Swarm too, huh?” She asked, unsure of what else she could possibly say.

Celestia grinned. “Nasreen Hazarika, a Sikh woman who appears to be of Punjabi descent.”

“I wish I knew what some of those words meant!” Luna laughed, and her sister joined in.

“Don’t worry, sister, you get used to these ideas over time!”

“One thing though: why choose the name Swarm? Doesn’t it seem odd?”

The smile waivered on Celestia’s face. “I’m afraid he hasn’t revealed that to me. He just tells me it has to do with his origins, which he says are ‘complicated.’ Although…” Celestia scratched her chin. “Discord did indicate that he might know something about those origins at our last meeting…”

“Oh, I’m sure he was just pulling your hoof, Tia,” Luna scoffed as she grabbed a fresh cracker from the plate. “If Swarm will not divulge his origins to you, why would he do so with one such as ‘him’?” She added a distasteful inflection to her last word, not even wishing to utter the Lord of Chaos’s name.

“I don’t know, sister,” Celestia said thoughtfully. “Discord made it pretty clear that he has the ability to travel through other universes as well. At least, on some level. Could it be that he might have witnessed Swarm’s genesis himself?”

“Oh come now, what are the odds of that!?” Luna waved her hoof dismissively.

“Quite good, actually,” the Lord of Chaos replied smartly as his head materialized next to her. Surprised, she lost her grip on her tea cup and cracker, sending them spinning into the void below them.

“Discord!” Celestia screamed irritably. “This is a private conversation, you know that…”

“Yes, I do hate to break up your little tea party, but we have INCOMING!” He screamed, grabbing them both by the mane and dragging them out of the time bubble. Swarm was already waiting for them. He turned around just as Discord returned with the princesses, who somehow ignored the fact that he clenched their manes in his claws and stared upwards, jaws agape.

“That’s the enemy, huh?” Luna said.

“Yes, dear sister.” Celestia said.

“Oh, well, if that’s all they’re gonna send, this shouldn’t be too…”

Suddenly, another portal appeared next to the first. Then another. And another. In the space of a second, hundreds of portals opened in the sky above their heads, each crowded with dozens of soldiers cramming their way through. Being nearly god-like, each of the beings below could sense the surprise flooding through each of the soldiers’ minds at appearing in this time bubble rather than a cute, little, pink forest, but at the sight of Swarm, that surprise gave way to a grim determination, slowly melting away to an entire army ready to annihilate the four little figures below them.

“You just HAD to comment, didntcha?” Discord sighed at Luna.

“What’s the plan!?” Celestia barked.

“You three take the half over there,” Swarm said, hooking his thumb over his shoulder at the sky behind him. “I shall handle the other half.”

“Bit egotistical, are we?” Discord said dryly.

“No, just pragmatic,” the man replied with a wink, raising his fists.