One Flap of Her Wings
Chapter 1: Every Hurricane Starts Somewhere
It was a scene out of a very specific kind of nightmare, the sort that only happens after eating a highly experimental cupcake right before bed. Pinkie had gone missing, and Discord's powers had gone on the fritz. Through a cobbled-together blend of tracking spells and nautical magic, the girls had ventured into his home dimension to try to rescue her from the madness... only to find that she had claimed both dimension and madness for her own.
And now Pinkie, grown to Celestial proportions—complete with horn, wings, and regalia to match—quadrilateraled off against Discord for the title of Spirit of Chaos. (It had been squaring off at first, but had swiftly grown irregular.)
The onlookers couldn't judge how the contest was going very well, more concerned with staying in the boat—again, nautical magic—and maintaining as much of their sanity as possible, but experience seemed to be trumping enthusiasm. Discord shut down everything Pinkie threw at him, usually with a scathing bit of criticism about her lack of imagination.
Eventually, Pinkie was reduced to trailing a hooftip through the ground—specifically ground cinnamon—muttering to herself as she tried muster up one last wave of nonsense. "Maybe if I... sugar-coated... polka-themed..."
Discord walked up to her, slowly applauding with a different sound for every clap. "A good effort, Pinkie. I may even ask you to look after the place for the weekend on occasion. But the equine mind just isn't built for this sort of competition. Now, because you're out of ideas—"
She smirked up at him. "I didn't say that."
And before Discord could react beyond raised eyebrows, she zipped up and kissed him full on the mouth. His ears splayed out, his eyes shrank to almost identically sized pinpricks, and his entire body stiffened into a T-pose that had his feet digging a few inches into the ground due to the angles involved.
Pinkie pulled back. Discord stayed as he was, beyond one eyelid twitching. She smirked, clapped her forehooves together, and slammed them onto the ground. Pink lightning burst out from around Discord, followed by a perfect stone model of Tirek's fist at his largest size erupting up from beneath him. The enormous punch sent Discord rocketing up into an enormous pie tin, where he slammed into the gray, flaky filling. That impact shattered the cococrete custard pie's flotation ring, making it fall onto Discord's monsters and crush his remaining life points.
The dust settled, and all that could be seen of Discord beneath the wrecked dessert were a cloven hoof and a dragon foot. The other ponies gasped. The panel of Leng spiders held up three zeroes and a frowny face. Pinkie smirked and spread her wings. "Now I'm out of ideas, and am therefore the—"
Wee-ooh wee-ooh wee-ooh!
Pinkie frowned and looked around, trying to pin down the source of the klaxons so she could klax off. “Wee-ooh? We never said anything about a wee-ooh, just a switch. What’s—?”
“PINKAMENA DIANE PIE!” The shout echoed across the entire realm of chaos, scattering slaads and sending jabberwocks burbling off for mimsier borogroves.
Pinkie gulped, ears flat against her head. "Mama?" Eventually, the echoes grew distorted enough that she could pin down the source with ease. "Oh, it’s just Fluttershy."
Fluttershy stepped forward, eyes narrowed and wings flared, setting herself between Pinkie and Discord. She almost physically glowed with righteousness and demands for retribution.
"Oh." Pinkie gulped again. "It’s just Fluttershy."
"I challenge you for the throne of chaos," Fluttershy said in a near-whisper that echoed from one end of the universe to the other.
The remaining onlookers gasped again. A few of them traded confused looks, tried to say something else, and just got more gasps. Twilight risked hyperventilation until Rarity snagged a few specimens out of a passing smack of jellyfish-like paper bags.
"Just the throne?" said Pinkie. In a flash, she lounged on it in a way that didn't look remotely comfortable for any quadruped who wasn't Lyra Heartstrings. "It's really more for lumbar support than anything."
Fluttershy just snorted. "You know what I mean. More importantly, the realm knows what I mean." She threw her head back and uttered a horrific ululation that should not, could not have emerged from a pony throat.
From all angles, Euclopean and otherwise, even stranger calls answered her from all the misbegotten wildlife of the mad universe. Every one of Discord's idle fancies became active at that cry, from the humblest piñata-eating bat to the ominous force that an observer could sense just on the other side of the horizon. Swarms of horrors flew in, mouths, proboscises, and stranger bits slavering.
Pinkie just shook her head. “You really need to contain your emotions.” She banged a hoof against the arm of her throne, and the first wave of monstrosities found themselves in cages of peppermint and pretzel sticks. Some fell from the sky... and the cages shattered on impact. Other creatures simply ate through their bindings, even after Pinkie shifted them from snacks to the nastier minerals that had to be weeded out of a rock farm with acid and a respirator mask.
Fluttershy raised an eyebrow. "Using chaos to trap creatures?"
"Discord does it all the time!" Pinkie cried, even as she pulled the throne up from its checkerboard hill and waved it at assorted mutant pests like an awkward flyswatter. "He tried to trap me in a princess tower five minutes ago!"
"You merely adopted the chaos. He was born in it."
"If you actually understand what you're referencing, you're better at this than I thought." Pinkie winked. An enormous toothless alligator swept through the hordes mere feet from her, scooping them up like a floating, scaly whale through plankton. "But I'm even better than that."
Fluttershy didn't shift an inch, even as the mad menageries broke and retreated to the five corners of the realm. Even the ominous presence pulled back and tucked the sky back into the horizon behind itself. But Fluttershy herself ground out a scratchy rasp from the back of her throat, somewhere between chittering insects and claws scratching at the kitchen door.
And from the shadows, the edges and corners of things, more scratching answered her.
“Hounds of Tindalos? Really? I’m fluffiest, cuddliest, curviest pony there ever was!” Pinkie considered her more angular, royal proportions and cleared her throat as the environment around her began to blur as though airbrushed. The unseen brush even moved as it blurred out more and more of the clearly defined region. “Okay, so I may have lost a little foal fat with the growth spurt, but we can fix that in post. Just like your modeling days!”
Fluttershy merely scowled at that, even as the scratches grew fainter, mixed with confused whimpers like cricket chirps. She spread a wing with a sound like an unsheathed sword and ran its primary feather over the frog of a hoof, leaving a shallow cut. She tilted the hoof down, and the first drop of blood hit the ground with the thud of a kettledrum.
She chanted harsh, guttural syllables as her blood kept dripping, slamming together consonants that generally wanted little to do with one another. But for her, they tolerated one another's presence. As the blood soaked into the ground, lips started peeling back from it. Countless mouths appeared and opened as far as the eye could see, each full of more teeth than seemed even remotely reasonable.
Pinkie looked down with interest as one such mouth revealed itself directly beneath her. "Ooh, Grandpa Cipactli!" she said as she took flight, smiling even as the mouth dragged itself open and revealed even more teeth going down the whole visible length of the gullet, some of which were attached to additional sets of jaws, some simply growing out of the surrounding tissue. "You’re calling in some heavy debts, Flutters."
Fluttershy just stared up at her. Not quite intense enough to merit the capital letter, but still an unforgivingly hard expression. “Discord has introduced me to a lot of his friends. We have a preexisting arrangement.”
"Neat! I'm kinda jealous. I'll have to see if I can find his contact list." Pinkie bobbed about, avoiding mouths that surged up from the ground, tried to suck her into their maws, or simply opened in midair attached to nothing at all. "But fiiiiirst..."
With a flash of pink and the sound of a party horn, all of the true Cipactli's innumerable mouths found themselves glued shut with something so eye-scorchingly hot pink that Rarity fainted dead away at the sight. The countless gullets struggled against the mass, the infinite teeth gnashed... but eventually they sealed themselves away, grumbles more felt than heard conveying perplexity, aggravation, and no small amount of indigestion.
Pinkie nodded to herself and smiled. "My patented salted caranut butter-water bubbletaffy. Works every time." She flipped upside down and wafted her way to just above Fluttershy, booping her snoot. "I see what Discord was doing now. Rope-a-dope works well when somepony like me can't help but be dopey when it's for the sake of a punchline. But for you, it'd just be a doping scandal. How about we wrap this up?"
Fluttershy glared at Pinkie, opened her mouth...
And let out a bullfrog croak.
She snapped her mouth shut hard enough to scrunch her muzzle, opened it again, and gave a screech like a howler monkey.
"Pretty sure we'd need Sunset Shimmer to translate that one." Pinkie beamed as she landed. "Ooh, there's a thought! Party in the human world to celebrate successfully defending my title. After all, you can't call for help if none of the help can understand you, and it's not like you chaos me directly. So that should be game." Pinkie nodded to herself.
Then she tapped a hoof expectantly.
Then she looked around, frowned and said, "Why isn’t that game?”
Fluttershy glared and bleated like a sheep. Applejack and Twilight both gasped like they'd meant to.
Pinkie just raised an eyebrow. “You know, when the only weapon you have left is literal bad language, you should probably give up.”
That got a series of barks.
“Wh-what do you mean?" Pinkie's smile grew nervous. Her mane started tying itself in knots. "Of course you’re still my friend. Aren't you?"
Fluttershy just glowered at her.
Pinkie... flickered. One moment she was the alicorn Princess of Chaos, the next back to her usual self, and then a number of different distorted versions of herself that cycled by too quickly to follow before settling back on the alicorn. But now she was sweating to the point of froth, her wings disheveled and mane twisting itself into eleven separate Prench braids. "I mean, we have to be friends!" she cried. "We need to be to fire the Rainbow-Wave Emotion Gun!”
“You’re busy being the Princess of Chaos," Fluttershy said intelligibly. "I don’t think the Elements will like that very much.”
More flickering. Onlookers could briefly spot Pinkie as a human, a stallion, a Diamond Dog. When she resolved herself back into an alicorn, she teetered on the brink of collapse. “B-but you’ll be Princess of Chaos if you win!”
Fluttershy shook her head. “I’ll give the title back to Discord. It’s his. And I don’t want to be friends with a brat who barges into someone else’s home, rearranges the furniture, and has to be kicked out.”
“That’s how my surprise parties always work!”
"Nopony else is having fun, Pinkie." Fluttershy looked from their friends to Discord. The brouhaha had cleared away some of the construction-grade pie filling, enough to expose his face, eyes squeezed shut in pain. Her gaze lingered on him for several moments before she shut her eyes. "That sounds like a pretty lousy party to me."
“But, but…” Patches of Pinkie's coat flickered constantly. One of her cutie marks kept throwing off sparks as it switched back and forth between the nine balloons of the Architect of Fun and her usual three.
“It’s your choice," said Fluttershy. "I can cajole, persuade, even issue ultimatums, but in this place it has to be your choice. Do you pick your friends or—“
Pinkie slumped to her haunches. “A bunch of sound and fury, signifying nothing." The distortions cleared up, her cutie marks settling on three balloons each. She sniffed back a tear. "You don’t play fair.”
A wing spread over her withers as best it could. "It’s a chaos duel, Pinkie," said Fluttershy. "That’s the only way to play."
“I really didn’t know he meant that much to you.”
Fluttershy nodded, accepting the apology. “He nearly destroyed himself just to make me feel at home. How can I do any less?”
Pinkie gave a sad smile. “I tip my horn to you.” She did so, detaching it entirely, to Twilight and Rarity's audible distress. Much of her body vanished into cotton candy-scented vapor, leaving only the usual unusual earth pony.
Fluttershy took the horn in her mouth by the tip—prompting more disgusted unicorn noises—and turned to Discord. After a deep breath, she blew into the horn, sending out not just sound but confetti in every color of an unearthly rainbow.
Once the pieces settled on Discord, they vanished and he bolted upright. “Who what when where which why how?" He looked around and rubbed the top of his head. "Did I win? It doesn’t feel like I won. After a blow like that, I should be in the Shadow Realm. Which is really more like a Partly Cloudy Realm these days. Ponies and their light pollution, I swear..." He trailed off as he realized just what was taking up so much of his vision. "Fluttershy?”
She smiled at him, tears in her eyes. “I won.”
“Ah. Yes." Discord coughed and hid his warm smile under a cold sneer, which resulted in a sort of lukewarm, wibbly expression. "I made you my last-second second. As of now. Very clever, my dear.”
"It was!" cried Pinkie. "She called in quiznarks and Tindaloos and ground mouths!"
“It. Was. Awesome!” Rainbow Dash shouted from her seat on the boat.
Discord nodded. “I’m sure. That victory left Pinkie wide open for summonings. So, what did her in?”
“Friendship,” said Fluttershy.
"Friendship? Again?" Discord rolled his eyes behind his golden skull helm and flung a green-smoldering warhammer into the distance. "You ponies, honestly."
Fluttershy flapped up and kissed him on the cheek. “You’re welcome.”
Discord blushed—no gags, no props, no shifts beyond turning redder—and rubbed the spot she'd kissed. “Ah. Well. Ahem." He snapped his fingers, and the lot of them found themselves at the foot of Twilight's castle, where Starlight Glimmer visibly restrained herself from asking a dozen different questions. "Same time next Tuesday?"
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world." Fluttershy glanced at Pinkie, who seemed back to her usual bouncy self. "Just remember to lock the door next time."