Chapter 1: Thanks, Celestia!
Discord stared at the bottle. He peered deep in its depths, only to see a fuzzled reflection of himself in the glass. The clear brown liquid was had an almost amber colour when brought up to the light, and the contents of the bottle itself was what mystified him the most.
Twilight, passing by the door of the room Discord was inhabiting, glanced back at the perplexed draconequus and raised a brow. “Um… Discord, why exactly are you in Celestia’s room?” Twilight asked.
Discord shrugged, sitting on pile of royal linens and outfits he had frisked from Celestia’s closet, which–like most of the room–was trashed with most of its contents discarded. A minefield of important documents, priceless jewelry and other such accessories that a princess would keep was hastily thrown about in an neglectful manner on the floor. “Oh, just the usual,” Discord replied, measuring the weight of the bottle in his claw, “ignoring Celestia’s personal space and rifling through her stuff.”
“You can’t just do that!” Twilight said, entering Celestia’s room with a scowl on her face directed sorely on Discord. “This is a complete invasion of privacy and highly illegal, I might add! Just because Celestia allowed you to stay in the castle doesn’t mean you can go through her stuff all willy nilly!”
“Ah, but wouldn’t you being here as well count as an ‘invasion of privacy’ as well?” Discord snickered, sticking his tongue out at Twilight.
Twilight was flabbergasted for a brief moment, but gritted her teeth and shook her head. “Then let’s leave. Now. I don’t want to get in trouble with Princess Celestia, especially over the fact we’re both in her private bedchambers.”
“Yeah, yeah, in a minute,” Discord said with a wave of his claw, inspecting the unmarked bottle closely. “Just trying to figure out what this thing is.”
“Where did you even get that?” Twilight asked, already at work using her magic to return all the shrewn items on the floor to their rightful place.
“Found it in the third drawer on Celestia’s dresser, along with some other... nondescript items." Discord tapped the glass, sniffing it. "Maybe it's chocolate sauce?"
"I don't care what it is. Can we just leave before we getting trouble?"
"If you can tell me what this stuff is, sure."
Grumbling under her breath, Twilight brought the bottle closer to herself with a magical glow and uncapped the top. Sniffing its contents, she grimaced. “Ugh, it smells like booze.”
“Booze?” Discord asked, tapping his chin with an errant claw. “What is this booze you speak of?”
“It’s fermented alcohol. And by the look and smell of it…” Twilight racked her brain for a few seconds. “I’d say it’s whisky.”
“Wow, you sure are an expert on this booze stuff, eh?” Discord said with a wink, quickly snatching the bottle from Twilight.
Twilight’s face became flustered. “W-well, I wouldn’t e-exactly say expert… per se. I do experiment with it on the odd occasion. Not all the time, mind you. Every once in a while… on the weekends… with my friends. And I make sure never to drink so much that I black out. Last time that happened, things got kind of…”
Discord held up a hand, cutting her off. “Twilight, while I would just love to hear more about your budding homosexual relations with your friends through the use of alcohol, I have more pressing matters on my hands.” Discord swilled the booze in the bottle, smiling as the liquid caught the light. “Like trying this stuff out.”
“Wait, Discord, that can be a bad idea!” Twilight warned, glancing furtively back at the door. “If Celestia walks in here and sees us messing around in her room with her whisky bottle–which I’m still trying to comprehend why she has it in the first place–then we’ll be in super big trouble!”
“Hey now, no need to fret,” Discord said, giving her a supporting pat on the head. “I’m a reformed Spirit of Chaos and you’re a princess. What’s the worst she can do?”
“Banish us to the moon?”
“In that case, I’ll just blame you for it.” And with that, Discord swigged down the alcoholic concoction, stopping first to gag. “Jeez, this tastes awful!”
“What do you expect?” Twilight asked with a roll of her eyes. “It’s whisky, so it’s going to be bad the first couple of times you taste it.”
Discord smacked his lips. The alcohol burned his tongue and throat, but settled in his belly with a warm, tingling feeling that made his body jitter. “Hmm… not bad on the aftertaste… and it reminds me of something.” Taking another sip of the burning booze, he nodded his head. “Yeah, definitely familiar.”
“Okay, can we go now?” Twilight begged, sweat pouring down her brow in streams. “Celestia could be be here any minute.”
After a few more seconds of chugging, Discord said, “Hick… yeah, sure.” A mighty burp erupted for his mouth, wafting the room with a breeze of whisky and chocolate milk. “That sure did hit the spot.”
“You drank… all of it,” Twilight noted with increasing dread, Discord shaking the bottle over his open tongue to collect the last drops.
Wiping his maw and licking his lips, Discord nodded in agreement and threw the bottle behind himself, where it cracked open against the back wall of the room. “Eeyup. Burns like hell, but it was pleasant enough. Makes me feel a bit weird too.”
Discord took a few hobbled steps forward, nearly stumbling over to crash into the ground if Twilight hadn’t caught him. Struggling under his great weight, she gritted her teeth and threw him off her back. “Don’t tell me you’re drunk now!”
“I’m as hickery as a dickery, thank ye very much!” Discord replied with a shaky finger pointed at Twilight. Discord’s already uneven pupils were rattling around in his eyes, his tongue sticking out over several feet. “Now get to me to the moon so I can have some cheese with my crumbly crackers!”
Resisting the urge to slam her head against the door for getting herself in another strange situation, Twilight grabbed the end of Discord’s tail and started dragging him out of Celestia’s room. “Sheesh, you might be a lightweight, but not where it counts.”
Twilight’s eyes suddenly shot open at the distant sounds of hooves trotting nonchalantly through the halls. The familiar hum that followed them only added to Twilight mounting terror as she quickly recognized the voice. “Oh no, Celestia’s here! Discord, we have to–”
Looking behind herself, Twilight was shocked to find that Discord has disappeared, leaving Twilight all alone. In a hastily cleaned up room with a broken whisky bottle thrown on the back wall. “Of course,” Twilight muttered, hindsight hitting her hard on this one. “Of course Discord would ditch me here. When I get my hooves on him–”
“Twilight, what are you doing in my room?” Celestia asked, gazing down at her student. Staring over her mess of a bedchambers, Celestia’s jaw hung low.
Sweating bullets, Twilight looked left and right for some saving grace to rescue her. “Uh… uh… uh… Discord did it!”
“Discord… entered my room and went through my stuff,” Celestia sighed, wiping a hoof across her face. “Again. Just great.” Breathing in a great breath of air and slowly releasing it, Celestia cast Twilight a mild glare. “What I’m wondering is why you’re here as well.”
“I was just walking down the halls, minding my own business, when I suddenly spotted Discord in your bedchambers,” Twilight explained. “Also, he drank your booze.”
“HE WHAT?”
Twilight winced at the sudden shift in tone and volume of Celestia’s normally temperament voice. “H-he found a bottle of whisky in y-your stuff. I told him not to drink it, but he wouldn’t listen!”
Celestia moved before Twilight and leaned down, lifting Twilight’s chin up with a hoof so the two were looking at one another eye to eye. “Now Twilight,” Celestia began, drawing Twilight to her closer, “how much exactly of the whisky did Discord drink?”
“Um… all of it.”
Celestia gulped, staring out to the distance. “Then we are in greater peril than I feared.”
“Princess Celestia, if you don’t mind me asking… why exactly did you have that bottle in the first place?”
Hanging her head in shame, Celestia replied, “When you work over forty hours a week with those stuck up snobs at the nobility courts, you’ll be downing more shots than you can count before you know it.” Celestia brought her head back up, a fire shining in her eyes. “But that doesn’t matter now, because we have a bigger problem on our hooves.”
“Discord?” Twilight guessed.
“Worse. A drunk Discord,” Celestia answered, already making her way out the door.
Twilight quickly followed by Celestia’s side, asking, “How exactly is a drunk Discord worse than regular Discord?”
“You’ll see,” Celestia said, her anxiety increasing with each fall of her hoof. “We’ll all see soon enough.”
“Take the two… divide by the volume… add a couple other reactants right here… by jove, I think I’ve got it!” Discord cheered, scrawling down the last of the formula onto the blackboard.
Twilight and Celestia burst through the doors of the library. Both mares stopped in their tracks at the unbelievable sight before them. A chalkboard over two stories high stood in the center of the library, dwarfing the large towers of books riddled around the room. On its surface was written equations, diagrams, formulas and mathematics and sciences so complex that it made Twilight’s head spin just trying to comprehend it all at once. To make matters even more puzzling was Discord, dressed in a sharply fashionable suit with wireframe glasses who was putting the finishing touches on a math problem at the bottom of the board.
Discord glanced at the duo with a composed look, not even stunned at their sudden interruption in his sanctuary. Taking off his glass and huffing his breath on them, he cleaned them with the edge of his suit. “Ladies, there are such common etiquette behavior called knocking, if I’m not mistaken,” Discord said, returning his glasses back to their proper position on his face. “So, what do I owe the pleasure of you two interrupting my brainstorming session?”
“Discord, are you drunk?” Celestia blurted out, her mane frazzled and such a look of fear on her face that Twilight has never seen before.
With a brief chuckle Discord waved his hand in the air, returning his attention to the chalkboard. “Why yes, Celestia, I am quite intoxicated. Thanks to that bottle of whisky I found in your drawers. Be more careful in the future when hiding your belongings, dear. You don’t know what sort of dastardly gent could be rifling through them. Like myself, I am sorry to admit.”
“Oh no, it’s worse than I thought,” Celestia whispered, holding a hoof to her mouth.
“What do you mean?” Twilight asked, glancing between Celestia and Discord in complete confusion. “I thought Discord was going to be drunk. I definitely didn’t expect… whatever this is.”
“As you already know, Discord is different from others. Alcohol has a… strange effect on him.”
“Eureka!” Discord interrupted Celestia with a shout, throwing his hands up in the air in triumph. “I just figured out the components to the safe and clean use of cold fusion! Equestria’s energy problems are solved!”
“Say what now?” Twilight asked, tilting her head at the nearly incomprehensible jumble of mathematics scrawled on the chalkboard.
“Instead of having the usual effects of alcohol, such as confusion, slowed reflexes or even loss of bladder control, alcohol has an opposite reaction to Discord,” Celestia explained.
“B-but… that doesn’t make any sense!”
Celestia shrugged tiredly. “It’s Discord. I gave up trying to understand him centuries ago.”
Twilight returned her attention to Discord, the nicely dressed draconequus busy with his complex equations. “So what exactly do we do with him?”
“We have to stop him, for one thing,” Celestia said, muttering unsavory comments under her breath. “Can’t believe this has happened again.”
“Wait, I thought Discord said he’s never had alcohol before.”
“That’s because he forgot about it the first time he got wasted.”
Twilight gulped. “What exactly happened the first time?”
Celestia sighed, holding a hoof to her temple. “The first time he got wrecked from booze was over a thousand years ago, when he was still in control of Equestria. At the time of his ruling, he wasn’t so bad. Really, he was a mild annoyance at the most. Pranks, random trickery, the usual for him.”
“But then he got drunk, right?”
Celestia nodded her head, and replied, “At first when he was drunk, it wasn’t so bad. A tipsy Discord resulted in him setting the fundamental standards of magic, creating the first number of spells that set the beginning of unicorn magic itself, and helped set off Equestria’s scientific revolution. We all thought it was wonderful, until…”
“Another breakthrough!” Discord called out, looking back over at the two with a smug grin on his face. “In another half an hour, I’ll have poverty and hunger gone off the face in Equestria in a jiffy!”
“As I was saying… we all originally thought that it was a blessing, until the hangover kicked in.”
“Wait, if alcohol has the opposite effect on Discord, wouldn’t a hangover be the opposite as well?” Twilight asked.
“You’d think that… but no. It’s more like a hangover upped to eleven. Resulting in the apocalypse as well.”
“Th-the apocalypse!” Twilight shouted, staring at Celestia with amazed eyes. “Discord caused that?”
“Well, he nearly did,” Celestia said, shuddering at the memory. “He came close to ending life itself and destroying the entire world with the severity of his hangover. Luna and I had no choice but to trap him in stone through the use of the Elements for a thousand years to halt his apocalyptic hangover. Last time he got so smashed that he couldn’t even remember the events, which I’m thankful for. I never thought he’d be able to find booze again, let alone drink it.”
“So… is there anything we can do?” Twilight asked. “I mean, we just can’t let Discord go all armageddon on Equestria again once he’s less tipsy.”
“Indeed. Which is why I need you to get the other Element bearers here to put Discord out of commission.”
“But wouldn’t that be bad?” Twilight pointed out.
“Not if we do it temporarily,” Celestia replied, slowly walking towards Discord. Looking back over her shoulder, Celestia said, “I’ll keep him busy and make sure he doesn’t get hung over until you arrive back here. The fate of Equestria is in your hooves, Twilight.”
“Don’t worry, Princess Celestia, you can count as me!” Twilight said with a salute, unfurling her wings in a confident sweep to show her readiness.
“Actually, there is a 44.96% chance that she will succeed in her endeavor,” Discord replied, pointing out to the over-complicated figures of his conclusion. “But an unknown variable may present itself, so go along with your mostly futile task anyway.”
“The sooner we get him sobered up to regular Discord, the better,” Twilight said as she scowled at the blitzed version of the draconequus. Then in a flash of light she was gone, off on her mission to acquire her friends’ help.
“I couldn’t agree with you more,” Celestia said, more to herself than anyone else. Casting Discord a sideways glance, Celestia’s hairs stood at end when she noticed Discord’s movements becoming sluggish. “And I can only hope that you arrive in time.”
