Some shocks can be processed by simply locking them up in a box and reserving the panic they deserve for a more opportune moment. Some shocks come in waves, peaking in intensity like the beating of a vast malevolent heart. Some bring us to our knees, or steal our breath away. But some shocks go beyond all others. Some are simply so out there that the uninitiated have no way of even comprehending them.

So it was that Twilight Sparkle and Sunset Shimmer found themselves staring in bewilderment at the absurdity before them.

“Oh.”

That was Sunset.

“Did…?”

Sunset nodded dumbly. Which was wasted, because no one saw it. All eyes were on the abomination before them, the draconequus ascended to some stranger, slightly more unsettling form. He had always been cartoonish in his antics and form. But this was somehow so overly silly and cartoonish as to be unnerving in the same way that the strangely lit smiling figures in certain amusement park rides had about them.

Discord looked around, shrugging his shoulders and making little “Eh? Eh?” sounds as if hoping at any moment, the crowded audience would begin to applaud.

Finally, he sighed and wilted just a bit. “Really? Nothing? That had something for literally everyone. The surreal, the comedic, the surprising! I was expecting, I don’t know, a guffaw perhaps? A chortle? A cheer? Ah,” he scoffed and smoothed out Midnight’s--or, perhaps it was now his own?--dress with exaggerated huffiness.

The Twilight at the End of the World, the Final Twilight, recovered first. She manifested physically in an explosion of magic. The alicorn reared up and from all directions, the army of Twilights charged.

It was, perhaps far too literally, chaos.

Twilight, the only one not in the hands of a mad goddess, found herself pushed along as Sunset tried to move them away from the epicenter of a magical hurricane. Twilights swarmed around them both, no longer interested in them in the slightest. She felt her head swim trying to parse that, to come to terms with being unescapably several’d. Something about being in the midst of them, seeing face after face, tugged at her sanity. It was if they were blurring together literally, and...

No, it wasn’t just her. Something was horribly wrong everywhere. She had thought it a trick of the mind, but reality itself was warped. The impossibly tall skyscrapers bent as if seen through shaped glass, and flickered strangely from color to color. The street beneath their hooves sloped first one way, then another.

Something… something broke. Perhaps it had always been breaking, since the moment that Sunset had tumbled in from god knows where, bleeding and frantic. There was a certainty about things. She was, in her own way, a scientist. The world was a machine and one could shift it into gear if only the manual were studied. Things made sense.

“Sparky! Sparky, you… oh Celestia, hey, you with me?”

Sparky.

Behind her, she heard the cries of unknown numbers of Twilights. She heard herself repeating ten thousand times over a dozen battlecries as the Twilight at the End of the World battled the delightedly laughing Discord. She heard all sorts of things, but her mind latched onto that one word. Sparky.

“Sparky, are you with me? We gotta… you gotta… oh, what the hell? What the hell, this is just--”

Before she had been Sparky. That was when things made sense. When they were normal. When 2 and 2 made 4, and when Sunset Shimmer wasn’t an interdimensional thief, and there weren’t millions of her or of anyone because there was only one, and…

“That’s it! That’s it! I can’t do this any more!” Sunset backed away, lighting her horn. She pulled the TPT desperately, and started to shout something.

Twilight snapped.

She summoned every ounce of her magic she could. She called it up and willed into a furious scream. Light exploded out from her and where it touched, the constant shifting of reality stopped.

Sparky and Sunset stood in the eye of an impossible storm.

Both of them stood facing each other, panting, still trying to come to grasp with… well, everything. Even as reality obeyed its own laws, she still felt her own mind slip one way and then another. She felt off-kilter.

“How did you… No, I guess the real question,” Sunset Shimmer said, “Is what in Harmony’s name is going on here anymore?”

Twilight, trembling, shook her head. “I don’t know. Midnight is gone. She’s not in my head. I’m… I think it did something to me.” The mare took a breath, and then continued. “Right now, we have some kind of… of Discord-Midnight Sparkle thing happening. I think that’s what’s happening. A version of me that wants to break the multiverse by breaking up every pair of us ever that can exist ever in any way is fighting the Thing. The Spar...DiscNight? The…”

“Chaos Sparkle?” Sunset offered.

“I… you know what?” She laughed deliriously. “Yeah, honestly that’s a pretty great name. Chaos Sparkle and Final Twilight. Fighting. That’s… that’s happening. We can’t run. Even if we could, we have to stop this. We don’t know what… what will happen if she gets her way? What if she wins? What if that Twilight beats Chaos itself? Do you want her in charge of existence?”

Sunset growled, “Weren’t you wanting to go home? Wasn’t that your number one goal? Well, these two are going to conjure up some major magical artillery and personally, I think any chance we had of getting anything done is--”

Twilight took a step forward.

“I do want to go home. I… I don’t like this.” She gestured all around her. “Not just this, right now. All of it. I’m tired of being constantly in danger. I’m tired of not knowing what to think of you and of myself, and of the two of us!”

“Then why not?” Shimmer dug out the TPT and magicked it into the air. “Climb aboard!”

“We can’t, it’s--”

“Look! The magic in the air, the chaos? I don’t know, but look at this thing. It’s hot, Sparky. We can just slide off.”

Twilight took a deep breath, or tried to. “I… Sunset, something is wrong.”

She tried to say more. Her mind was rioting. Emotions came and then went, as if the part of her that had once sustained them hadn’t quite rebooted. Behind them, there was an explosion that she felt the heat of on the back of her neck. They couldn’t stay here. Not this close.

“Yeah, that’s wrong!” Sunset pointed frantically towards the titanic struggle. Twilight turned and saw the final alicorn and the newly minted god of chaos and apparently Twilight’s libido flying into the air, circling each other and brimming with power. They were like twinned comets locked in vicious dance. “Look. You coming?”

“I… no, I mean…”

Sunset’s brow furrowed. There was another explosion high above them.

“Come. Don’t come. I’ve got nothing either way,” she spat. “My Twilight is just… gone. As far as I’m concerned. These Twilights are… doing whatever. Who even cares? We can just bail. Keep dialing and get you home and then I can do whatever, life goes on, gotta slide. All that. Or maybe we just keep going, huh? You? Me? This thing here? Come on! Game over, Twilight.”

Another explosion. Around them, the last Twilight’s impossible city was beginning to buckle under the strain.

“Can you really get me home?” Twilight asked. She swayed a little. “If you can get me home, then let’s go. But I’m… I think Discord messed something up, and I can’t really handle parsing out the truth, so I need you to tell me. Can you really get me home? Is that something you can do?”

Sunset’s mouth opened. It closed. She worked her jaw.

Twilight began to shiver.

“Eventually,” Sunset said. “Eventually.”

“She was what you were looking for, wasn’t it? You dragged me along with you… no, you didn’t, did you?” She laughed bitterly. “I set off the TPT, didn’t I? But you would have done it anyway. You can’t get me back. You never could. I made a mistake, and now I’m stuck with you forever. And you would have done it too. I’m just another Twilight, aren’t I?”

Sunset flinched as if she’d been struck. She tried to speak, and then she clenched her teeth. She squeezed her eyes shut. “I… I didn’t… It’s not like I can’t. I can’t, like, right this second! And you aren’t just--I mean, look, all of you aren’t just exchangeable! I never meant that!”

The earth shook.

Obviously exasperated, Sunset shouted, “You can come. You can not come. I don’t care. I’m out. I’m out of all of this.”

Twilight swallowed. Her head swam. Her thoughts came in confused double-lines. She felt certain Sunset was lying. But she was just as certain that Sunset wouldn’t lie to her, not like that. Not about that. She tried to reason it out, but she couldn’t. Not now. Not with all of this. It was jump or don’t jump. Trust or not trust. Sunset or whatever was behind her.

Sunset held up the restored TPT, but she didn’t activate it. Her chest heaved. Her eyes were… pleading. She said she would leave Twilight behind, but her eyes were like prayers. That would have to do for now. Jump it was.

Twilight took a listless step forward. She squeezed her eyes shut and the light bled through them as Sunset sent them elsewhere.

Discord and the last alicorn dueled.

The city of Twilights was in ruins. The ground had swallowed it up. Jagged spires, half gone, dotted the polka dotted and taffy landscape. Fire and devastation side by side with chocolate rivers and lemon trees that bore only pumpkins that sang slightly off key. Cats and dogs living together.

More succinctly, everything was chaos.

Discord, true to their name, decided that it was absolutely wonderful. It was perfect. It was everything they had dreamed of and more. Midnight Sparkle knew what it was to be absolutely unleashed, and Discord knew what it was to be at the center of an entire world in chaos once again.

“Is that all you’ve got?” They cried aloud, in a twinned voice. “Come on, Twilight!”

The alicorn didn’t use words. They were less efficient than arcane blasts. Discord dodged them all, making sure to glance behind to see their lovely arcs wreak havoc. Below, an army of Twilights struggled in futility in now somewhat molten chocolate, which was worse yet tastier than any quicksand trap. Wonderful! Better than he had ever hoped!

“I can’t believe I didn’t think of this sooner!” They cackled with glee as they conjured up a perfectly mint-condition Challenger 2 tank, complete with a tea kettle nestled inside. They hurled it at the alicorn, who flew up at them like a missle, cutting through the armored vehicle and continuing on like Achilles.

It didn’t matter how many tanks she cut in twain, or how many armies of brainwashed Twilights she commanded. They’d let him in! And given him prime access to perhaps the greatest treasure of all: a piece of the pie. A volatile shard of universal kismet. Midnight herself. And now he and she were Chaos itself. The more she fought, the more the chaos spread, like putting out a fire with flour.

Where would it go? Why, anywhere. Everywhere.

You know I can’t last that long like this, right?

Ha! Of course not. You were never meant to be your own thing for long. You’re a part of a system. An overgrown part! A vital part! But just a part. Never a whole. You know that.

Cackling, Discord did a loop and dodged another blast. And count on the persistence of Twilight Sparkle in a rage to not notice that she was just helping the spread! This had definitely turned out better than could have been hoped for! Another blast, and another gleeful dodge.

Think of it this way! You’re not long for being awake, and I’m not exactly going to let The Fussy One remake everything in her image. Two birds with one stone, right? One last hurrah?

So: you, me, one last battle and the job’s done. You know… I kind of like it. Sounds fun. I lock this bitch down with you, I can fade away happy.

Multiverse, here they came. They’d give the final Twilight enough rope to hang on, and have fun doing it. If anyone was going to break multiverse-spanning rules of reality, it was going to be them that did it.

And a bit of chaos here and there afterward?

Oh definitely.