Chaos Theory

by Matthew Penn

Rating: everyone
Tags: Other, Pinkie Pie, Twilight Sparkle, Random, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Length: 1906

Pinkie Pie learns why it's never a good idea to divide by zero.

There's an old saying that curiosity killed the cat, and that some mysteries are better left unsolved. What will happen if Pinkie Pie finds a calculator and decides it was a good idea to divide a number by zero? Everything.

Published 2014-08-21 21:00:03 UTC
Last updated 2014-08-21 21:00:03 UTC

Chaos Theory

For some part of the afternoon Twilight tried to solve a difficult math equation. It wasn’t a homework assignment, it was just a weird quirk of her’s. Beside studying magic, math was also a favorite pastime for Twilight. Nopony understood it, not that it mattered to her.

“Five, divided by the cosine of 27, multiplied by the square-root of 25,” she muttered to herself. She wrote down the best answer she could give, then crumble the sheet of paper and threw it into the waste bin. “No, that’s not right!” Twilight produced another sheet of paper and copied the problem from her textbook.

“Okay, let’s try this again. 58, multiplied by 27, subtracted from the square root of…”

“Hi Twilight!” somepony yelled. The unicorn fell out of her chair with a loud thump, her eyes in a daze. When Twilight recuperated a young pink mare stood over her with a wide toothy grin. “What are you doing on the floor?”

“I wasn’t doing anything, you scared me!”

“Oh, sorry.”

“I thought I locked that door.”

Pinkie Pie looked over at the desk Twilight occupied and saw a pile of paper along with a textbook, pen and pencils, a ruler, and a calculator. “Are you doing homework, Twilight? I thought you finished school?”

“It’s not homework. Doing math equations is something I do in my spare time.” Pinkie walked over to the desk, confused as to why Twilight would choose this as a hobby. Looking at the mountain of college-ruled line paper, row by row she saw numbers, weird symbols and other things she couldn’t understand. “You must really love math.”

“Of course I do. Math is essential to everyday life. Without it, there are so many things we wouldn’t be able to do - like count money, or perform experiments, or - “

“ - Uh huh,” Pinkie said. One object on Twilight’s desk interested her. A square shaped machine of some kind, with buttons that had numbers and symbols. She picked it up and examined it with her eyes and hooves. “What’s this thing?”

“That’s a calculator. It’s a device used for solving equations.”

“Cool.” Pinkie pressed the button with the number two on it and the two appeared on the screen. Then she pressed the plus symbol and then the number two again. After pressing the equal sign, the calculator blinked and the equation transformed into a number four. “Wow! It really does work!” She pressed more numbers and symbols and received answers, much to her delight. “This day would go by a lot easier if you use this.”

“I don’t need a calculator, Pinkie. My brain is perfectly capable to figure out difficult math problems on its own. Somehow, I can’t seem to solve this one.”

Twilight showed Pinkie the math problem in her textbook. Her bottom jaw hung open as she tried to take in the pageful of strange letters, difficult symbols, and numbers she never knew existed. Pinkie had never seen this many numbers when she was in school. There were big numbers, tiny numbers, squares, triangles. She feared her brain might shut down just by staring at it for too long, so Pinkie looked away quickly.

“Maybe you should take a break Twilight,” Pinkie said. “Math can really hurt your head.”

“I can’t take a break now! I was just on the verge of solving this equation! I may have gotten the wrong answer during the first twenty times, but I’m sure the last piece of the puzzle will fall into place if I apply myself.”

A low rumbling sound startled Twilight, and when it grew louder she felt it coming from the bottom half of her body. Realizing her stomach was the one making the weird noises, she decided it was time to take a break from her math problem. “I’ll be right back, I’m going into the kitchen.” Twilight retreated from her work to satisfy her belly, leaving Pinkie alone with the calculator.

The pink mare played with calculator, her feeble mind easily amused of how many answer the device can create. She figured if everypony had a calculator in their hooves, the world would be a much better place. “This thing can do anything!” she exclaimed. She saw a lone number at the bottom of the calculator, isolated from the others. It was an oval-shaped number, a zero if you will. “Hmm… I wonder.”

Pinkie pressed the zero, and pressed the number one and then two more zeroes, followed by a subtraction sign. With heighten anticipation she pressed the equal sign. The equation transformed into the number one hundred. She tried the same thing with multiplication and addition. The last symbol was the division sign. She typed 100 divided by zero into the calculator, then pressed the equal sign. To her surprise the device did not produce the answer, but had an ERROR sign on it.

“Huh, what happened?”

The room shook and Pinkie was thrown into the ceiling, along with other stuff in the living room. Books fell from their shelves and glass shattered into pieces. The room shook again and Pinkie was thrown back into the floor face down. From the current state of the living room it was a like a hurricane had broken through. Paper and books were scattered all over the floor, chairs and tables were split and half, and the beams that held the ceiling began to crack.

“Pinkie, what happened?” Twilight yelled as she ran toward her. “Was it an earthquake?”

“I don’t know,” Pinkie answered frantically. “I was playing with the calculator and then - “ Before she could finish, the room shook again, but this time the mares were thrown sideways into a wall. Broken glass and half of a table forced their way at them, but Twilight produced a force field to shield herself and Pinkie from the flying debris. They peeled off from the wall and landed safely, preparing for the worst.

“You were playing with the calculator, and then?”

“... That’s just it! I wasn’t doing anything, everything just went - “

The treehouse shook, this time more ferociously, and gravity forced the mares into the ground. It felt like a 1,000 ton weight was dropped on them. Twilight and Pinkie could not stand up to save their lives. Luckily, the feeling didn’t last, and everything was back to normal… for now.

“We have to find out what’s going on!” Twilight said. Without another oncoming calamity, she and Pinkie managed to make it to the front door. Opening it revealed a horror they were not prepared for.

The town was in a state of chaos and disorder of the likes not even Discord was capable of creating. Buildings and houses were upside down and inside out. Wood and debris floated in the sky, trees pointed sideways and downways. Pegasi flew backwards, other flew uncontrollably in zigzags. Ponies around were being thrown in different directions, or being glued to the walls and the ground. It was natural to say that the laws of physics had abandoned them.

“... What is going on?” Twilight said.

“... I don’t know,” Pinkie answered.

From the corner of her eye Twilight saw a cat barking and chasing a shrieking dog, and to her left she saw a chicken turning back into an egg and returning to its mother. Strange indeed. “Come on, we have to find what’s going on so we can - “ Once again the ensuing chaos did not give her a chance to finish her statement. Twilight was flung into the sky then dropped like a rock into a cart of cabbages.

“Twilight, are you alright?” Pinkie yelled. She wanted to help her friend, but was caught in a tornado made of cats and dogs. The tornado spat her out and landed in the cart of cabbages with Twilight. “What in the name of pink is going on!”

A giant tree grabbed the mares with its wooden arms and roared at them. It was unlike any tree they have ever seen. It was ugly, terrifying, with its black eyes and red pupils. Twilight shot a magic beam at the tree to it drop them. “Let’s get out of here!” she yelled.

Everywhere they looked, chaos reigned. The sky was literally falling apart like pieces of a puzzle. The solid ground was unstable, making the unfortunate ponies feel like they were in a balloon house. Pinkie would have been the one pony who thought this could be fun, but she knew couldn’t have fun if nopony else was.

The Carousel Boutique was in a state of havoc. Rarity's clothes and ponnequines chased her like monstrous abominations. The apple trees of Sweet Apple Acres threw apples at the Apple family. Clouds devoured pegasi, including Rainbow Dash, who tried to fight them off but to no avail. Fluttershy did what does best in a crisis like this - hide in a hole and hope for the best.

"Twilight, our friends are in danger! We have to help them!"

"It's too late, Pinkie! We have to save ourselves!"

"Twilight?!"

She was right. There was no way they could help their friends, or anypony. It was no use running from the destruction and madness. They stood together, watching everypony they know and love suffer before their eyes. Pinkie realized she still held the calculator in her hooves. In a fit of anger with herself she threw it away and it dismantled violently when it hit the ground.

Then, the mares, as well as the rest of Ponyville and possibly Equestria, felt themselves being lifted from the ground. Twilight heard what sounded like a vacuum in the sky. “Twilight, what’s going on?” Pinkie yelled.

“I don’t know!”

Something in the sky consumed the sun, and everything grew dark. The mares and the other unfortunate ponies were caught up in the air, as well as houses, animals, and trees. The vacuum-like sound became louder and menacing. “Pinkie, I think we’re being sucked in a black hole!”

The black hole in the heavens was unstoppable. Anything that was caught in its gravitational pull nothing could escape, not even light. Whatever that once was became no more. Soon the world will be what it was in the beginning, dark and void. Twilight and Pinkie’s bodies started to stretch like rubber bands and the earth was fading away.

“Pinkie, this is the end!”

“No… No!”

“Goodbye!”

“Nooo!”

It wasn’t supposed to end like this. There was so many things Pinkie never had the chance to do. With tearful eyes, she watched her world ascend to nowhere. “What have I done,” she said to herself. The mares closed their eyes and held to each other, waiting for whatever was in store for them on the other side…

“... And that’s what happens when you divide by zero,” Discord explained. “Any questions?”

The classroom at the Manehattan Institute of Technology was stunned into silence by Professor Discord’s explanation of his own “Chaos Theory.” Granted, he was not a mathematician, or a physicist. Discord had no interest in the well-being of his “students.” He tricked the original professor into taking a day off by disguising as the Dean. He was bored.

“No questions? Good. Remember, there’s going to be test on all of this tomorrow, so I expect all of you to study really hard. Your grade for this semester depends on it! Understand? Good. Class dismissed.”