You Need Physics to Go Fast
Discord is Clarkson
“I just can't be bothered,” Discord said half bored towards the princess with the stern look on her face. Said princess looked up from whatever statistic she was torturing with her overly analytic look.
Celestia frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“Everything,” Discord continued. He was sitting on a chair that wasn't fitting the snakeish shape of his body at all, and his hoof and talon pressed too ungentle against the too hard marble for him to, indeed, bother.
Lightly shaking her head, Celestia went back to optically assaulting the paperwork. The not unexpected loss of attention of the golden eyes from which the calming heat of a warm summer afternoon radiated came too swift for him to bother, again. So he kept talking.
“I lack any understanding of how you can stand all this.” His talon pointed to the papers, which he believed to reflect a soft, golden glow. But then again, he was much more into pink than into gold, leaving blue out of the question, anyway. He rested his talon upon his paw on the very polished oak-wood table that stood in the precise middle of the vast room. There were not tortured papers there, too. They were his.
Celestia turned the sheet she was reading and looked at Discord for the briefest time. “As far I can recall, you volunteered to take function in the castle because you couldn't stand doing nothing at Fluttershy's cottage. Which, if I may say so, handled you better than the other way around.”
Discord raised his eyebrow. Given the fact that one could not know ponies stopped considering a mice as proper food for a falcon for no apparent reason, he in fact couldn't be bothered there either.
“When I volunteered for that,” he said, “I more thought about making changes to Equestria.” The sound of sheets being moved came to his ears, and in the corner of his left eye a paper illuminated by a golden aura moved towards him. “Proper changes,” he corrected himself.
A subtle sigh came from the other side of the table. It may also have come from the tapestry behind the white-coated ruler. It hung between two large windows that let much more light of Celestia's toy through than it was healthy for the eyes of whoever wanted to look at the expensive waste of whatever material it was the tapestry was made of.
“Proper changes,” she repeated him. “We talked this through, Discord. You can't spread your chaos, especially on my ponies' cost, only because you think it's more fun.”
“Your ponies,” he repeated her, “are exactly what I have in mind!” He picked up a stapled stack of paper and held it towards Celestia, “Nothing of this does anyone any good! I mean, look at it! Nowhere does it say 'Hereby I declare everything to become better'!”
Celestia turned another page, “It doesn't work like that.”
“But it should!” An exclamation at which, remarkably, even one of the two guards couldn't keep himself from frowning. They were two ponies that were seemingly charged with keeping the doors from running away.
“Just think about it,” he said. “Talking doesn't solve problems. Nor do papers. You said me being chaotic wasn't the problem as long as I controlled it. And I want to, really! Order alone just isn't made to improve things. Chaos is! You need me if you want your ponies to live a life truly worth the short time they spend on it.”
“Just that nothing you ever did improved anything from the viewpoint of a mortal. And I never said such a thing. In fact,” she cut him off by lifting a hoof off the paper before he could even start arguing, “judging by your latest behaviour I have no reason to expand your responsibilities as to actually let you decide anything that could be important,” she took a brief pause, “ever.”
“But you have all reason to do so!” he instantly answered, not even bothering on finding anything he couldn't be bothered about. Except the pointlessly large chandelier above their heads, maybe. “For instance all your farmers still do all their work by hoof, with only the most basic machinery.”
A pretty unsatisfying nod confirmed this. “It has been like that for ages. Proof that it works.”
“Exactly!” Strangely, he found both his paw and talon in the air, pointing at Celestia, “Take this, as an example of how great everything could be. Still working but better!” With a snap of his talon a white flash of light brightened up the room, forcing the guards to shut their eyes and Celestia to look up in surprise. But the flash was nothing compared to what the loud crash of a big block of metal upon the table caused, nearly breaking it into half.
“What is this?” Celestia angrily shouted, her papers now lying on the table, others being scattered across the room or cruelly crushed. One of her hooves pointed at the block of metal. It was longer than it was high or broad and had strange pipes coming out at seemingly randomly chosen points but all of them pointing up.
“Fear it not,” Discord tried to calm her before he was turned into stone or found himself sitting on the moon, the latter of which he knew, from a source he truly believed in, not to be any pleasant either. “This I call a V-8 engine.”
Celestia's eyes apparently couldn't decide whether they preferred a grinning Discord, the strange metal block or her guards who dropped their spears. “An engine? What does it? If it's any threat I--”
“I assure you it is none.” Something deep inside him told him that this was his chance to finally improve Equestria, and probably the first and last. “ In fact, this is one of the many things I came up with to improve Equestria. If you put this V-8 engine in front of the things farmers use to do their farmer stuff, then it will do all the hard work for them! Pull stuff to make the ground grow plants: it will pull it. Make things spin to crush food to smoothies: this will do it. Even works with bricks!”
“Why would you want to drink bricks?” Celestia asked, her anger slowly morphing into confusion.
Suddenly he remembered why he couldn't be bothered to listen to what she had to say. “It even could make earth ponies fly!”
Celestia shook her head and lifted some papers up with her magic while she signalised her guards to stay calm, what they barely achieved. “Slow down, Discord. I don't see how this block of something could help anyone to fly, and I am not sure if I want to either. Earth ponies never flew, so why should they start desiring it now?”
Discord couldn't believe his ears and attached many weird-looking metal parts onto the engine-thing with another snap. “Because it is brilliant! This thing,” he pointed at the ridiculously large machine taking in almost the whole table now, “this thing you see right there is the small version of what I shall call a plane. You sit an earth pony in and off he goes, one-hundred eighty knots above Equestria. And just wait until you see the cars. They're--”
“Stop,” Celestia said in a firm, commanding voice. “I don't know what those... planes, knots or cars are, but I surely won't allow any pony near any of those things unless I know they are save.”
“Of course they aren't save! It is the whole point of it! What fun would it be? They can crash, explode and go up in fireballs, burning the flesh off a pony's bones in seconds!”
Celestia gaped. Again, after all those years of relative peace, Discord yet again defied any sense of reasoning. “That's terrible!”
Discord rapidly shook his tail just above the table, “But it's not! It is a necessary part of what I shall introduce to the population as the Ultimate Equestrian Overhaul, short UEO.” A short glance down on the very reflective surface of the table showed him that his face decided to exclaim all this to Celestia with a big grin. “You see, this V8-engine will make everypony's life easier. So much easier even, that soon ponies will have much more time doing what is fun because they will have to spend much less time on doing what's not! I allow them to live the spirit of true fun! Unfortunately, this ultimately will let us end up with too many ponies, because for some reasons obscured to me, ponies can't find greater fun in anything than in--”
“Discord,” Celestia interrupted him yet again, a grim expression on her face. “If you don't add any sense to all this pretty soon than this will have been the last time I've heard you say 'vee eight' for a long time.”
“And that's why this UEO includes a foolproof feature to keep the numbers down,” Discord deadpanned. “Occasionally a pony will end up in a fireball, allowing other species to also have a chance to exist. Because, that small isle you call Equestria plus neighbours really doesn't do anything in that matter, now does it? So I worked out a way to improve that, too. I'll make it faster, bigger and round.”
Celestia sat back down on her chair again, waiting patiently for the absurdity dropping out of Discord's mouth, liquefied by its unbelievable level of being horse hockey, to end. “You can't make a landscape fasten up, Discord. It doesn't move.”
Proudly pushing his chest out in his chair and holding his head high, Discord accidentally made himself that big he actually had to worry not to push his head into the wasted glass hanging from the way too low ceiling. “But I made it move. Or rather will, if you agree to it. You see, threatening to hex me into stone really does give me a certain fear about what I can do without asking you first and what not.”
With closed eyes Celestia muttered, “And that's a good thing.”
“So, if you allow me,” he never could be bothered to care for muttered words, “I will personally make this world round. I'll turn it into what I shall call a planet, expend the oceans, add new lands to the world so the ponies, now being able to go significantly faster, actually have somewhere to go, and then, and believe me, this is a masterpiece, make the whole planet go around your sun.”
White ears peaked up. “Go around my sun? How would I be supposed to control the sun that way? And what about Luna?”
The draconequus changed from grinning to smiling at this, far from lacking answers yet, “Why, indirectly, of course. You won't push the sun but the planet. The sun will be significantly powered up, so it can propeller us at an incredible speed through what I shall call space. This is all part of what I will present to your scholars as the incredible invention called physics, the major improvement Equestria will see. The sun will have a mass, roughly equal to your flank, what will then--”
“Discord!”
“Alright, alright! Luna, as you asked before, will still control her moon as it will go around us while we go around the sun. Of course, I can't ignore your cutie-mark, seeing how important it is to you. So you also will be able to control the sun directly while it goes around a black hole, the best invention ever made, if I may say so myself. Whatever comes too near will be sucked up by it, so technically a black hole has the potential to be everything at the same time!”
Both free hooves Celestia had were incredibly busy trying to calm her down, running slow circles across all over her head, a special technique to calm one down in situations of high stress, shown to her by Luna not long after she returned to civilization. It was also a technique that made you look like an imbecile.
“And don't say you won't allow it! All scholars will absolutely love physics! It contains all sorts of things, like force, air density, gravity, acceleration, and all of that actually makes sense and is needed to be applied correctly to make everything work. They will be busy their whole lives getting behind that system. Magic will be nothing compared to this! But, combine it with magic, and it would have even blown out the mind of your former pupil, Star Whateverhisnamewas. The bearded one. And there will be improvements on mathematics, too. You will be able to determine the space that is inside a surface, for example. If you'd want to know how much space in a circle is, you'd simply take what I shall call its radius, the distance from its middle to where the circle ends, and you'd only have to take this to the power of two and then multiply it by the amount of circles you need to build a square!”
“But you can't build a square with circles. None of this makes any sense,” one of the guards said, visibly suffering a strong headache.
“Please,” Celestia said, signalising him to keep calm and silent, what instantly was followed by a honest excuse.
“Exactly!” Discord answered nevertheless. “And it still would work. This principle will be the new way you will orientate on the new, round Equestria. Enhanced mathematics will bring to you the pure witchcraft of physics. Want to know where you are? Simply take the angle a line from you to the centre of our new planet would form with another line that connects to the equator, a circle going around the planet, with said centre, and then measure the degree, including minutes and seconds. And, oh no, those by no means are only a measurement for time anymore. Three thousand six hundred seconds will make up one degree. And the length of one such degree shall be called nautical mile, because it will be most helpful for the new ships, similar to cars but for water. And mile is a nice word, too. And a nautical mile an hour will be a knot. And that then will be the speed measurement for earth ponies that fly with my new planes.”
“Discord, I--”
“And if you still doubt my good will, I even invented something to calculate the sides of triangles, and I shall call it the midnight formula, in honour of Luna. And you'll see, one day a university shall give me a doctorate for all of that.”
With that, Discords body dropped from its firm positioning back into the not really caring position he occupied minutes before, every inch of smile disappearing instantly. “It will be chaos by order by chaos. The perfect new thing for everything and everyone.”
Celestia looked at the draconequus minutes long waiting for any sign of more nonsense coming from him, but as it seemed that follow up was not existent, Celestia lifted all scattered papers in the room up at once and placed them back on the table. She looked at the large machine on her table and then to the confused, scared and likewise fascinated guards at the door. Tapping one hoof on a free spot on the table, she made up her mind.
Celestia stood up and sighed. “I just can't be bothered.”
Author's Note
So, this story is not to be taken seriously in any terms. Not in content nor in editing. Not even the title has been chosen properly. All of a sudden I thought 'Discord is Clarkson', opened openOffice and wrote this. No preparation, no deep meaning, nothing. Nevertheless you are invited to drop a comment. I love comments.
Thanks for reading! I guess.
