Episode Two: The Spin-Off
It was the weekend, right in the middle of a sunny Saturday, and the front lawn of Button Mash’s house was the site of a conflict hard-fought and crushingly lost. The colt in question lay sprawled in the grass with his best friend Rumble amidst a whole mess of action figures, comic books, and haphazardly strewn bits and bobs of various board games. They looked exhausted, hopeless, and defeated. Their battle had not been against the Evil Zork, star of the latest plastic figurines from Marettel, nor was it against the fickle world of Goblins and Gremlins, a truly esoteric card game for ages ten and up. It had been against boredom.
They had lost, spectacularly.
“Rumble,” Button grumbled, turning his head to look at his best friend pegasus. “Rumbllllle. What do you wanna dooooo.”
Rumble, lying on his back next to Button and staring up with the same vacant expression, glurked from the back of his throat. His tongue lolled out of one side of his mouth.
Button summoned one great mighty effort and flopped his hoof over Rumble’s face.
“Rumbllllle,” he said, repeatedly lifting and dropping his hoof on Rumble’s nose. “I’m soooo booored! Tell me what to do!”
Rumble’s wing flicked out and shoved Button’s hoof back so it flopped over his eyes. “I don’t know, man. I don’t know,” he whispered. “I… I feel myself slipping away, Button. I’m pretty sure my brain is turning to mush.”
“This is it,” Button rasped. “This is how we die. Two spunky kids with everything going for them, laid low by the doldrums of the weekend. They’ll find our dried up corpses on the lawn, and… and Mom will be there. And she’ll cry. She’ll cry ‘Oh! What have we done to these poor children? If only we had given them more stimulation! If only we hadn’t ignored their quiet, heart-breaking, incredibly adorable whimpers for help!’ And then everypony will set up a funeral for us and make a promise to have fun in our honor forever and ever.”
“... Do you think Scootaloo would show up?” Rumble asked, enraptured by the thought of Scootaloo dressed up just for the occasion, sad, thoughtful even, truly wishing to have been their friend. Shedding a single, beautiful tear just for him.
“Nah, she thinks we’re lame,” said Button.
“Oh,” said Rumble.
“Button Mash! Rumble!”
The two colts shrieked and spun around. Button Mash’s Mom stood in the doorway of her house, glaring down at them.
“What are you boys doing? This yard is a mess! Clean it up this instant!”
“But Mooooom!” Button griped. “We went to all the effort of taking it out so we could have fun today!”
“Button, you and Rumble took all that stuff out here, threw Marenopoly pieces at each other for five minutes, and then lay there like marooned sailors for two hours. Clean up this mess and then go find your fun elsewhere; I’m tired of you two being so lazy!”
They winced as the door slammed shut. Button flopped back on the ground.
“Aw, man. Now we gotta clean, too? This is the pits!”
“Actually,” said Rumble, “I think if we just get started, we should be done in about ten minutes.”
“Who does Mom think she is? We’re kids! We need our stimulation, right? It helps us develop into mature, well-rounded young adults. I mean look at everypony else!”
Button pointed over the fence to the sunlit world outside. Foals gamboled and giggled unctuously in the glowing sun rays, playing catch, enjoying tea time, and skipping around tall flowers while puffy clouds smiled down at them.
“Now that right there is some darn good maturing!” Button snapped. “I’m sick of being bored around here, Rumble. Where’s the excitement in this town? Where’s the adventure?” He threw his hooves up into the air and screamed at the top of his lungs.
“WHERE ARE THE HEROES?!”
“What’s that buzzing noise?” Rumble asked.
All of a sudden their attention was drawn to their fence, which exploded. Through the spray of wooden shrapnel a shadow flew over their heads, a pegasus filly riding a scooter, emblazoned with glory as she was silhouetted by the noonday sun.
Rumble felt his heartbeat stop, mouth agape. The moment seemed to pass in slow motion as he watched Scootaloo perform a sick one-hoof stand on the scooter, smiling confidently. She towed a wagon behind her, and two fillies sat in it, hanging on for dear life, but with looks of determination on their faces. Sweetie Belle had a map and her mouth was open, shouting directions, and Apple Bloom was preparing some kind of mechanical gizmo even as the wagon soared through the air. Button swore he could hear his own heartbeat.
Time returned to normal and the trio crashed onto the street, careening down the hill in front of Button Mash’s house and heading straight for Ponyville. With a plume of dust and a screech of tires, they were suddenly, abruptly, gone.
“Whoa,” said Button Mash. They hurried into the street to watch the fading Cutie Mark Crusaders, off on another adventure.
Rumble looked at Button, who looked at Rumble. Their sheer awe at the spectacle could only be translated into so many words.
“WHA-HUH-HOW-DID YOU SEE-WHOA MY GOSH THAT WAS-AHH SO COOL-I CAN’T-”
“Wait!” Button said, stuffing his hoof into Rumble’s mouth. “How was that even possible?”
“Well,” said Rumble, pulling Button’s hoof out, “our whole neighborhood is kind of built on a gentle slope, see, so if you start up at the top and build enough velocity—”
“I mean how were they having more fun than us?!” Button exclaimed. “This happens all the time! We sit around complaining about how boring things are, then we watch the Cutie Mark Crusaders or their big sisters and friends go on some amazing adventure with glitter and stars! Have you ever noticed a weird trend around this town, Rumble?”
“That we’ve skewed the numbers of most groundings per capita in our district due to our out of control hijinks?”
“No! I mean it feels like all the fun and excitement only ever happens to certain ponies like those girls. Have you ever seen the Crusaders doing anything normal?”
Rumble sat down and thought of all the times he’d watched Scootaloo and her friends (but mostly Scootaloo) across the playground, or across the street, or across town through his telescope from the back window of his house. “Well now that you mention it, they are always doing something kind of amazing. Scootaloo doing tricks through town or hanging out with Rainbow Dash—”
“The three of them going to the Crystal Empire for the Equestria Games—”
“Getting to hang out with Discord a lot—”
“At least one of them winning every Sisterhooves Social two years running—”
“Getting all the credit for Big Mac and Cheerilee’s upcoming wedding—”
“So you see what I’m saying!” Button finished, punching one hoof into another.
Rumble blinked. “That we need to resign ourselves to a life of mediocrity, sure.”
Button smacked a hoof over his face. “No, Rumble. I’m saying that they’re basically the only foals here with lives that are fun and cool and not dumb and boring! They’re like a vortex that’s sucking up the amazingness in this town! Every time something important happens, it’s always to them! But when the rest of us little ponies try to break the mould, we see only bitter failure. They’re unbalancing our chakras and warping the very fabric of reality while the rest of us linger in humdrum podunk normality. It’s like we’re the side characters in some cosmic play, doomed to insignificance while somepony else plays the hero!”
Rumble could only shrug. “Well, what are we supposed to do about it? I don’t think it’s a crime to be a little above average. There’s always going to be ponies who stand out, and we should support their natural talents instead of tearing them down. You should stop being so paranoid that someone is literally stealing the metaphysical thunder of everything around them.”
Button gave him a nonplussed look and pointed off to Ponyville, where in the time they had been talking the Cutie Mark Crusaders had finished a song and dance number that enabled them to help Snips and Snails find their true inner confidence and start a new business. They heard the lingering echo of Pinkie Pie announcing a party in honor of the event and saw banners going up all over town.
“Okay, maybe that’s a little weird,” Rumble admitted, “but even if it’s true, which it’s probably not, I don’t think there’s much we can do about it.”
“Oh, there’s something we can do about it,” said Button, standing tall and thrusting out his little chest. “We’re gonna take our heroism back, Rumble. Those Crusaders think they have a monopoly on what’s cool? Well we’ll just have to show Ponyville that there’s a new duo in town, one that can be just as helpful, kind, and overall amazing as those fillies.” He wrapped a hoof around Rumble, pulling him so close Rumble could smell the eight bowls of Choco-lots Button ate for breakfast on his breath.
“We’re going to be our own heroes and take back our awesome quotient.”
“Wait,” said Rumble. “This sounds suspiciously like some kind of ill-fated attempt to match the success of something that’s totally different yet better than us in every way. You remember what happened when Battlesmash the Barbarian’s sidekick Ultar got his own show — and we aren’t even the Crusaders’ sidekicks.”
“Nopony is going to be a sidekick except for you!” Button snapped. “Besides, Ultar lasted what, three seasons? Long enough to get his own toy line, even! We’re going to form our own club, and then we’re going to march out there and show those one-trick fillies that they can’t hog all our glory. We just need a name to spread our legend. Something that’s uniquely us. A brand all its own. I can see it now. The world will know the names of…!”
“Please don’t be a cheap rip-off,” Rumble whispered.
“THE COURAGEOUS MARVEL COLTS!”
Rumble sighed and rolled his eyes. “It’s gonna be a long day.”
———
“Hi Davenport!”
The owner of Quills and Sofas almost leapt out of his skin when the two colts squeaked at him in unison.
“Gah! Oh, goodness, you boys scared me! I was just in the middle of checking my stock,” he said with a nervous chuckle, already looking over his shoulder to make sure his inventory still existed.
“Why would we scare you when we’re here to help you?” Button asked as he hopped up on the nearest couch.
“Yeah! We’re here to lighten your load!” Rumble chirped. “To share your burdens! To enhance your entrepreneurship as only the addition of two young, chipper, and capable pairs of hooves can!”
Button punched Davenport in the shoulder. “We know you’re a hard worker, Dave. Can I call you Dave?”
“No,” said Davenport, frowning.
“Dave, we’ve come to realize that life as two spunky, rambunctious but well-meaning colts just doesn’t have the kind of purpose we’re looking for. Now you’re a business owner, heck, you run half the shops in this town!”
“Always hidden in the background, never being appreciated!” Rumble whimpered, crossing his hooves over his chest.
Davenport couldn’t help but smile wryly. “Well, I do sort of blend in. This is a farming town, you know, so somepony’s gotta keep the cogs moving outside the fields! Running five or six jobs at once, ponies just sort of assume I’m somewhere, and don’t really take the time to—”
“Wandering around the back of everypony’s minds, unloved, unnoticed!” Rumble continued, going down on one knee like the star of Roameo and Juliet. “Forever part of an unsung choir, lost to the toil of menial labor! Smothered by the endless monotony of your own pointless existence!”
“Your soul crushed, your hopes buried under the weight of a hundred duvet covers and ten thousand quills, never to know the light of sweet satisfaction!” Button added in the face of Davenport’s growing scowl. “Well fear no more! We know your pain, friend, and we wanted to show our appreciation of Ponyville’s most overworked and underpaid citizen by being his special assistants!”
Davenport recoiled from the full-frontal assault of two humongous, sparkly grins at once. It was so saccharine he felt some kind of sugary bile rising in the back of his throat. All he could see in the future was quick, merciless destruction of his defenseless merchandise — most likely by fire. He had to nip this in the bud.
“Oooh, well, wouldn’t you boys know it? I find myself today with absolutely no help needed! Ha ha ha! Yep! Nothing for you kids to do today, so go ahead and find something fun to do! You don’t wanna waste your childhoods in this stuffy old box store anyway, right? Right!” He snatched Button off the sofa and pushed him into Rumble, shoving both colts towards the door.
But they would not be dissuaded, digging their hooves into the ground as they thought desperately for new ideas.
“Wait, wait! I can think of stuff for us to do!” Button cried. “How about we sort your quills?”
“That’s already done,” said Davenport, trying to ignore the skid marks Button and Rumble’s hooves were scratching into the hardwood floor.
“Stock your shelves?” Rumble tried.
“Done,” Davenport grunted.
“Organize your ottomans!”
“Done.”
“Prioritize your pens!”
“Done.”
“Catalogue your caprioles?”
“Done.”
“Itemize your inks!”
“Done, done, and done.”
“Wait! Hold on!” Button snapped, arresting his progress by spreading his hooves to grab the doorframe. “Where do you even get the time to do all this stuff? You can’t be that lame!”
“For your information, it’s not lame to work hard at what you do for a living,” Davenport grunted, putting his shoulder into shoving forward the more Button pushed back, leaving Rumble to be squished between them like so much play-doh. “I just take pride in being organized. Besides, you kids burned down Diamond Tiara’s mansion, so why should I trust you to help?”
“She was rich enough to build it back!” Button squealed. “Now give us something to do or we’ll make it up as we go, and you do not want to see the end result of that!”
“Trust us, you really don’t!” Rumble wheezed as he felt himself get squashed into the second dimension.
The pressure lifted. Davenport stepped back and sighed, covering his face with his hoof.
“Okay, look, why are you here?”
Button took a deep breath. “To help the undervalued background ponies everywhere—”
“No, I mean at this store.”
“Oh, that’s easy,” Rumble squeaked. “You’re the only place in town the Cutie Mark Crusaders haven’t stopped by and helped already. We checked everywhere else.”
“That explains the explosions and commotion I heard earlier,” Davenport muttered. “Look boys, the Crusaders are lovely fillies. Why don’t you just try to take a page from their playbook and only help those who ask for it?”
Button and Rumble gave him blank stares.
“Look, if I just give you something to do, will it make you leave?”
“Yep!”
“Fine.” Davenport pointed out front. “All you have to do is dust down the display merchandise I left outside. Here, take this feather duster. Once you’re done, feel free to go somewhere else.”
“We’ll make them sparkle!” the boys cheered as they rushed outside.
Davenport breathed a sigh of relief. “There is no way even those two could cause trouble with that job.”
———
Princess Twilight Sparkle glared at the grinning faces of Button Mash and Rumble from across the width of her writing desk, looking decidedly unimpressed. The two colts were absolutely smothered in quill ink and feathers from an old duster, along with several other strange things. She didn’t even want to know how the mustard factored in.
They sat in the middle of her study in the depths of her crystal palace, far away from the prying eyes of Ponyville and the vengeful screeching of Davenport. A grandfather clock tick-tocked away in the silence, and she let it fill the room for several awkward minutes, hoping to impress on her new charges the gravity of their situation.
"Let me get this straight," she said slowly, "you're both worried that your lives are growing dull and unimportant despite the fact that neither of you even have cutie marks yet, and you're jealous the Cutie Mark Crusaders are able to run around and help out around town while your claim to fame is that you burned down Diamond Tiara's house. So in a last-ditch attempt to find meaning and purpose that is as completely and utterly lacking in common sense as it is logic, you terrorized poor Davenport along with half of Ponyville, and now you're demanding that I give you some big important friendship task so you'll be heroes?"
Rumble's grin immediately faltered. "Uh, well, anything sounds bad when you don't word it right, miss Princess ma'am. I prefer not to use the words 'completely and utterly lacking in common sense.'"
"And your words would be?" Twilight wondered with a very severe arching of her brow.
"… Vexingly precocious?"
Twilight slapped her hoof on her crystal map, making the boys jump.
“Need I remind you that you are still under close observation from the Diamond Tiara incident?”
“She had enough money to build it back!” Button whined.
“That’s not the point!” Twilight snapped, and then tried to soften her tone to something more princess-y. “Look, you guys, I want to encourage creativity and free will as much as the next alicorn, but you’re going about all this the wrong way. You can’t force destiny or purpose any more than you can force friendship. It has to happen naturally, and artificially stumbling into problems just so they can be fixed isn’t going to solve anything. So before you go any further, let me say that this is going to be the first step of your intervention.”
“Intervention?” Rumble asked with the most adorable tilt of his head. “But we’re not drugaholics.”
“Yeah!” Button growled. “You’re off base, lady! This whole court is out of order! I am offended and kind of confused!”
Twilight held up her hoof. “No no, this is not meant to be a punishment — as much as Davenport would like to think otherwise. As the Princess of Friendship, it’s my duty to foster goodwill and harmony in my town, and I can’t do that if I’m stifling you. I’m just going to try and steer your course to something a little more productive. Forget about the Cutie Mark Crusaders, boys: you’re going to be under my wing from now on!”
“You mean like… your students?” Rumble asked, his lip all a-quiver.
Twilight giggled. “Well, if you want to see it that way, sure! Celestia has been trying to find a way for me to apply my princess skills more directly. This will be an excellent way to start.”
The Princess affected a large grin that was a bit too big to be sincere in Button and Rumble’s eyes, but now they tasted something better than mere recognition: fame. Being directly answerable to a Princess was just about the best possible job in Ponyville, not to mention the most important.
“Dude, this is our shot at the big time!” Button stage-whispered to Rumble. “We’ve gone from zeroes to heroes!”
“Her wings are so pretty,” Rumble sighed. “We have to take the job!”
“You don’t have a choice,” Twilight said, because she heard everything. “Also it’s not a job because I’m not paying you.”
“We should negotiate for benefits,” Button kept shout-whispering. “Ask her for crowns! And a couple crystal chairs.”
“Only a couple?” Rumble hissed back. “What if we have friends over?”
“Dude, the chances of us making friends are nil. Either way there’s no way I’m letting them share the glory!”
“Okay. We’ll take it, for just two chairs,” Rumble said, extending his hoof to Twilight.
“You’re not getting any chairs,” Twilight replied, though she shook his hoof anyway since she was at a loss how else to respond. “I haven’t gotten the castle to grow anymore furniture. Now, come on. I think I know how to help you two channel your energy into something more creative.”
She led them behind the study, into her slowly growing and extremely chaotic-looking library. It was big, with floor upon floor of bookshelves, and shelves lining the walls. Compared to how many empty spaces were left, the mountainous piles of books still to be shelved looked like a few hundred or so too many.
“Oh, no,” Button groaned.
“Oh, yes!” Twilight chirped, excitedly spreading her wings. “This is where we’ll start. All the latest books on child psychology say a growing young mind requires consistency, security, and organization! What better place to find all of those things than in the hallowed hall of a library?”
“We’re going to shelve all of these?!” Rumble squealed, trying to shrink behind Button.
“No, no, of course not,” Twilight said. “I’m going to teach you the dewey decimal system and then Spike will help you shelve them. This way you’ll be kept out of trouble—I mean, you’ll be learning an important life skill and helping me solve a very important problem!”
“What problem is that?” Button asked, crossing his little hooves.
Twilight levitated a series of old tomes and spun them around in the air, showing off volumes from Neo-Classical authors all the way back to pre-founding Equestria. Rumble looked impressed; Button less so. “Why, the problem of orphaned books that need a home! You see, boys, books are the pillars on which the next generation will be built. By helping me here in the palace, you’ll be ensuring that wisdom gets passed on to ponies far into the future, long after even the Crusaders have stopped Crusading! It’ll be one of the greatest things you’ve ever done for ponykind, and best of all, you’ll gain an appreciation for the quietness, comfort, and knowledge of a library. After this, I’ll be surprised if anypony calls you troublemakers ever again.”
“Wow,” Rumble whispered, his wings spreading wide at the wonder of it all. “That sounds great!”
“Pffft. That sounds lame,” Button said, rolling his eyes. “No offense Princess, but this is a library. How is anything important going to happen here?”
“Oh, that’s what they all say at first,” Twilight said, winking and grinning much more forcefully than Button thought she needed to. “‘Oh, Twilight, it’s just a library, how important could it be? What lost and forbidden knowledge could possibly be contained here? I know it was only your most cherished possession in the whole world when Tirek vaporized it like so much kindling, but they’re just paper and we can always make more paper.’” Her eyelid twitched as she started gesturing wildly with her hooves, making Button and Rumble back up nervously. “Oooh, but then next thing you know you’re buried alive in forms authorizing new lumber shipments and you can’t find a single publisher because they’re all too busy releasing the new Daring Do novel and Davenport’s breathing down your neck not to give permits to competing ink sellers and Celestia herself is bugging you every other day, ‘Waaaah, Twilight, where’s the first edition of So-and-So’s Ancient Cake Recipes, I have a party to host and you only have three days to help me!’”
By the end of her rant, after much hoof flailing and accidental spitting, the Princess of Friendship was seething through gritted teeth, eyes staring wildly into nothing. Button and Rumble looked at each other warily.
“Are you okay?” Button asked.
“Me? Oh! I’m fine,” Twilight said, snapping immediately back into Amicable Princess Mode. “Ignore all that. It just gets a little tense in here when it’s just me and Spike.”
As she turned away, calling out for her dragon assistant, Rumble turned worriedly to Button.
“I think maybe we should think about this.”
“Eh, she’s a Princess, it’s bound to come with some stress,” Button said with a shrug. “Besides, it’ll just be boring old book shelving. We’ll do it for an hour and sneak out when she starts ranting again. How hard can it be?”
———
“GO! GO! GO! GO!” Twilight, Rumble, and Spike chanted as Button, sweating bullets and teetering on a ladder ten feet up, struggled to decide where to put Pony Platonic Doctrines, by Mareistotle.
“Come on, Button! Remember what I taught you!” Twilight shouted.
“I can’t pick! Is it philosophy or history?!” Button whined.
Twilight stamped her hoof. “If you don’t shelve that book properly thousands of years of knowledge will be lost! It could be ages before that book turns up again and there isn’t a single other copy of it in all of existence!”
“Aaaah!” Button screamed at the pressure.
“You got this!” Spike called. “Just ask what Twilight would do!”
“She’d stop yelling at little colts!” Button snapped back.
“Just remember Button, it’s your destiny to shelve that book!” Rumble said. “We’re here to do something awesome!”
Button looked between the two empty spaces in front of him. One led to a life of satisfaction and fulfillment. The other was only full of shame. As choices raced in his mind, he felt an invisible clock ticking down to doomsday, and with a herculean yell, he made his choice and slammed the book home.
There was silence in the library, and then slow clapping from below.
“Congratulations,” Twilight said as she applauded. “You two may get better at this yet. Now for the next lesson, we will—”
Spike belched suddenly, burping up a letter that Twilight quickly snatched up and read. She sighed and rolled her eyes before turning to the door. “Our weekly crisis, right on time. Come on, Spike. Button, Rumble, you stay here and read up. And don’t touch anything!”
“Hey! What are we supposed to do while you’re gone?!” Button whined, struggling to climb down the ladder.
“Read up!” Twilight answered without breaking stride. “This shouldn’t take long.”
“Well, great,” Button said, crossing his arms. “Now what are we gonna do?”
“We keep working and be diligent and responsible so that when Twilight comes back she'll see that we really can be redeemed?” Rumble suggested.
“Well, yeah, but I mean how do we do all that without having to work?” Button grumbled. “This is way more stressful than I thought it would be and I don’t feel like going through another existential crisis for every cross-genre book we find! There’s gotta be a way to get this done fast. Twilight will be super impressed and then maybe she’ll give us something actually important to do.”
Button immediately started rifling through the piles and piles of books still left untouched. Rumble tapped his hooves together, fretting.
“I dunno Button,” he said. “This is a Princess’ library. Like she said, who knows what kind of arcane secrets are contained here?”
“Maybe something like a spell that will make the books shelve themselves? Or something else that makes life infinitely easier?” Button groused, throwing books left and right without care for where they landed. “I mean, she runs a library and she’s the best magic user in like the entire world. You’d think that in all of this, somewhere, some way, somepony would have found a way to—”
He stopped as he lifted the next book, pointing to a strange purple glow coming somewhere deep within the pile. “Rumble, are you seeing this?”
“Yeah,” Rumble whimpered, shaking as he came up behind Button. “And I think we should forget we ever did.”
“But what if it leads to something cool? What if it’s a book that Twilight forgot she even had? Having the gratitude of a Princess is something even the Cutie Mark Crusaders don’t have under their belts!”
Button dug into the pile with renewed fervor, tearing apart the wall of dusty tomes and revealing a book-lined passage that led deeper into the leather-bound pile. The purple glow waited within.
“Whoa,” the colts whispered, and with visions of finding ancient treasure in their eyes, descended into the unknown depths. The purple glow soon became the only source of light within the shadowed, dusty tunnel beneath the book pile, and they got the distinct feeling that this was something ancient and profound. They wandered into completely unknown territory, even to Twilight Sparkle, and bore witness to volumes that hadn’t seen the light of day since the far-off, forgotten days when Twilight dumped them on the floor of the library and forgot about them about three months ago.
Somewhere beneath that venerable and antediluvian menagerie of forgotten lore, the two colts found themselves in a large cavern, lined with scrolls and fraying book spines. At the very center, atop a sad little pile of second-edition Daring Do and the Mystery of the Albino Capybara copies, rested a jet-black book emitting the sickeningly purple glow that had guided them. It had no title, and a red bookmark rested between the pages.
“Whoa,” the boys whispered again. Button started forward, but Rumble grabbed the other colt’s tail in his teeth.
“Hold up!” he hissed. “We’ve read enough comics books to know that opening that book is a really, super bad idea!”
“Pppt,” Button said, rolling his eyes. “You forget one thing, my earnest friend: life is not a comic book! Sure our world has Discord and changelings and crystal palaces that grow out of magical seeds, but ancient tomes of evil are not found in the bottom of random book piles. Besides, if it were really that bad, some creepy voice would have told us to stop by now.”
“Beware,” a creepy, sibilant voice whispered from between the cracks in the books that jutted out of the walls. “Beware, for this book contains terrible and forbidden knowledge! To know it is to know madness and despair…”
“See?” Button said. “It just told us that the book has lots of useful information. So let’s pop it open!”
"Your funeral, losers," the voice whispered.
Button flipped through the ancient tome, his eyes reflecting the sickly purple light, and he moved with automatic and frightening precision, as though something otherworldly had a grip on him. He turned each and every page blindly, quickly, like he dimly remembered what he was looking for, but not exactly where it was.
And then he stopped. The glow became brighter, uglier, and more frightening. A drawing on the page depicted a strange monster made of arcane sigils and terrible magic, raising up mighty towers throughout the land. Rumble peeked through his hooves over Button’s shoulder, whimpering as they read the words on the page aloud together.
“Behold the words a prison be, for he who might shackle destiny. This thing a mess cannot stand. Speak these words and you will have a beast of order at your command.”
“Whoa,” Button said. “Rumble, do you know what this is?”
“Creepy,” Rumble said.
“No, it’s a solution to our problem! This place is a mess, right? And this apparently summons something that takes care of messes! If this spell can help us fix up the library, Twilight will be so thankful she’ll probably hand us the keys to the city! Then everypony will see that we’re just as good at helping as the Crusaders. Heck, they might even start to forget about the whole house-burning incident.”
“I dunno,” Rumble said. “Something about all this is giving me bad vibes.”
“What makes you say that?”
Rumble peered at the eerie light, the sepulcher-like atmosphere, and the strange riddle in the book with an evil voice. “Call it a hunch.”
“Oh, come on, Rumble!” Button grumbled. “What are we gonna do, sit around and accept that we’re just going to be losers who can’t even get the gratitude of a bookworm princess? There’s nothing here that can’t help us. I’m not going back out there to get harried by a pony who’s got more book than brain between her eyes, you get what I’m saying?”
Rumble sighed heavily, knowing that Button had chosen his course and wasn’t about to be dissuaded from it. “All right then,” he said with a hapless shrug. “I know I’m going to regret this, but if it gets us any closer to being recognized as the best helpers in the world… we’ll just have to make it worth it in the end, right? As long as we do this with the ultimate goal of helping ponies like we set out to do.”
“Up up up! By helping ourselves first. Like so!”
Button slapped his hoof down upon the passage, and said aloud, “Great tome of knowledge! By the power of the twin moons of Zanthar, by the power vested in me as head of the Ponyville Electronic Entertainment Club, and by the authority of our great moral fiber—!”
Rumble snorted.
“I command that you release the great magic hidden in these pages, and give us command of this spell that will organize anything at our command!”
“Also maybe don’t be evil,” Rumble squeaked as the light grew brighter and the book cavern rumbled, unable to contain the sheer amount of power being unleashed. Swirling things that looked like screeching spirits surrounded the colts and a beam of energy shot from the book to the top of the cavern, scattering the roof.
The two colts backed up, suddenly regretful as the light became blinding and the rumbling grew to a roar. In moments the terrified foals were clinging to each other and screaming for mercy as the spellbook lifted from its pedestal and let out an unholy explosion of magical energy. The wave expanded outward and struck them both, sending them reeling, tumbling, shouting…
For a moment, all went black.
When they awoke, they found themselves sprawled out on the library floor, in puddles of their own drool. The book cavern was nowhere to be found, and only the strange tome remained underneath Button’s hoof. As Button and Rumble looked around in stunned silence, they saw that everything was just the way Twilight wanted. Books were shelved, chairs were tucked beneath desks, mountains of scrolls were separated into neat little piles.
“Wow,” Button said. “Did something actually just happen without any real consequences for us?”
“I think that’s breaking some kind of universal law,” Rumble muttered.
As if on cue, the entire castle began to rumble.
“I knew it,” Rumble said, covering his eyes. “Tell me when it’s over.”
Button watched with growing horror as the book in his hooves shivered eerily, as if trying to escape his grip, accompanied by a growing noise that sounded an awful lot like the evil chuckle of Emperor Darkmane from Space Unicorn, Enchanted Issue number 7.
“At last!” a deep, angry voice boomed all around them. “At last, I am free!”
“Free?!” Button squeaked, doing his best to keep the book from flying from his grip. “What do you mean free?! I summoned you to clean!”
“You summoned me to bring ORDER!” the voice thundered. “And that foolish Princess has kept me in that dismal dungeon of bibliographical bile for too long! She is no true Librarian to keep her tomes scattered, to let that lazy purple thing lay his dirty claws on them! I am sick of this world disrespecting the power within my pages! No more!”
The book leaped from Button’s hooves to hover in the middle of the library, the pages flipping back and forth wildly. Lances of magical energy shot in every direction, surrounding whatever they struck with the same sickly purple glow they saw in the book cave.
“No more will any book be discarded and left behind. No more will children like you soil our precious pages with your filthy touch! No more will disorganization and chaos be the watchword!”
“But keeping this library is like, Twilight’s job!” Button shouted back as he tried to hide under his beanie hat. “She had a system and everything!”
“HER SYSTEM IS WRONG!” the voice screamed, and books jumped right off the shelves, pelting the poor colts as they ran for shelter behind the nearest table that wasn’t floating. “Who does she think she is? Madame Rosemary’s Herb Garden in the hobby section?! This is clearly HORTICULTURE!”
“Button,” Rumble said as they cowered, “I think we did something wrong.”
“What, this?” Button said, gesturing at the books flying wildly and tables crashing against the walls. “This is clearly the result of an inattentive parental figure like Twilight Sparkle! The nerve of her, leaving two small colts in a library full of cursed books! Completely unprofessional.”
“Okay, but how are we gonna fix it?!”
Button peered over the top of their table shelter. “Don’t worry bro, I got this.”
He stepped into the middle of the literary maelstrom, holding up his hoof and planting the rest on the floor. “Attention, my creation! It is I, the mighty being who summoned you! I hereby command you to—ULP!”
Rumble winced as Button crashed into the opposite wall, buried beneath a pile of levitated desks and ancient books. Then the floor started coming apart right beneath Rumble’s hooves, more furniture was flying everywhere, and the little colt couldn’t do anything but huddle up and cry for help and also cry in general, and for Thunderlane to bring him his teddy bear.
“I will ensure that this world is brought to order!” the voice cried. “Using the very things that you ponies have tossed aside! Your junk will be my body, my shell! Through it, I shall make everything in Equestria is perfectly organized, from A to Z! And then… then I will organize the world!”
Shelves, books, potted plants, and chunks of wall all flew to the center of the whirlwind and coalesced around the book, forming a protective wall, but not a single piece of debris was broken or askew; pieces of wall and floor had been lifted in perfectly measured squares and rectangles, and not a single book had page torn from its binding. Then more and more things joined the pile, and Rumble knew it was time to go. He charged the library door as the hinges neatly unscrewed themselves and went off to form part of the growing monster’s leg, picking up Button on the way out.
“Rumble,” said Button as he lay across the pegasus’ back, “I think this is the second house we’ve destroyed in as many months.”
“And a Princess’!” Rumble squeaked. “We’re gonna get thrown in a real dungeon this time, with a bucket for a bathroom and rocks for pillows and no comic books!”
“I’m thinking we skip town,” Button said. “Change our names to something less conspicuous. How does Bumble and Rutton sound?”
“I think it sounds like desperation,” said Spike, arms crossed as he stood in the middle of the hallway. Rumble and Button screeched and skidded to a halt, ending up in a pile right in front of the little dragon.
“Weren’t you supposed to be helping Twilight?” Button asked, raising an eyebrow.
“I am helping her, by keeping an eye on you guys,” Spike said, raising an eyebrow with a certain draconic severity. “And judging by the horrible noises chasing you down the hall it looks like Twilight was right to send me back.”
“It’s not what it looks like!” Button threw his hooves up in the air. “We’re victims here! Victims of a libertine society that puts dangerous knowledge in the hooves of innocent foals!”
“We looked at a book and it was the wrong one,” Rumble sighed, hanging his head. “The really, really, super duper wrongest one in the whole library.”
“Oh, boy,” Spike said, watching the hallway come apart behind them. “Well, if I were Twilight, I would be more worried about the library than saving my skin. Good thing I’m not her.”
“Can we keep running now?” asked Rumble.
“Yeah,” said Spike.
And so they ran for their lives as geometric sections of the palace lifted all around them, absorbed into the growing mass of gem-themed decor behind them.
“Why do you run?” the evil book monster yelled—neither Button or Rumble were sure how to describe it at this point. “I wish only to do as you asked! To make this world clean and orderly!”
“What book did you even use?!” Spike wailed as the stairs they ran down melted away behind them.
“Only this really evil one hidden at the bottom of a magical book cave!” Button answered. “It said, it knew how to help!”
“Oh, man,” Spike groaned as they scampered for the front door. “This is what happens when Twilight insists on standing by her principles of free knowledge—HUAAAAAAH!”
Button and Rumble watched in horror as a floor panel tore itself from the ground, lifting the hapless dragon with it and dragging him kicking and screaming into the quickly growing vortex of castle debris behind them. There was nothing the two colts could do but scream and run as they yanked the great castle doors open, babbling incoherent promises about never letting curiosity get the better of them again.
But they found their path blocked by Twilight Sparkle, and suddenly they both wanted to run right back the way they came.
The Princess stood there in all her furious, divine glory, wings spread, hooves planted firmly in the ground, eyes narrowed to slits that glowed with an angry power behind them.
“Twilight!” Button and Rumble yelped.
“Button! Rumble!” she barked.
“Twilight!” Spike wailed from between two frescos and Twilight’s dressing table.
“Spike?!” Twilight shouted back, looking up at her dissolving castle before turning her angry gaze back to the colts.
“Button…” she snarled.
“Rumble!” said Button, pointing at Rumble.
“Button!” said Rumble, pointing at Button.
“Twilight!” Spike screamed again.
“Spike!” Twilight snapped in a ‘not now’ tone of voice.
“Twilight?” Rumble said, pointing at the tornado enveloping the castle.
“Rumble,” Twilight groaned, putting a hoof over her eyes, apparently trying some kind of breathing exercise. Then, she put her hoof down and said “Ugh.”
In moments Button and Rumble found themselves swept up in Twilight’s magic and deposited firmly on her back.
“Hang on,” was all the boys heard before she launched into the air, just before a massive fist made of crystal and tacky potted plants dented a crater into the ground where she stood.
“You!” the monstrosity that was once Twilight’s house bellowed. “You are the one who imprisoned me between terrible speculative fiction and technical manuals! You will be the first to watch this world be remade in glory!”
“Twilight!” Spike cried out from a prison of stair bannisters. “Help!”
“Hang on Spike!” the Princess called back. “We’re getting you out of there! Whatever you do, don’t antagonize it! Or touch anything! Half that stuff in there is very delicate lab equipment!”
Spike glanced around his cell, which was only just big enough for him to stand in, and grumbled. “Sheesh, even in jail she can’t help bossing me around.”
“I heard that!”
One of the crystal tree’s branches windmilled wildly outward, forcing Twilight to swoop out of the way.
“I can feel the magic holding that thing together,” she explained as she zipped out of arm’s reach of the behemoth. “It’s a heavily modified version of Orville’s Organizational Obliteration spell. Made to clear a room of clutter in one angry swoop. I don’t know how a demon of Order got a hold of it, but it’s got a lot more power than a simple maid’s assistant spell. I bet there’s magic in the book too, and it’s using that as a battery.”
“Demon of Order?” Button asked as he clung to Twilight’s mane for dear life. “Those exist?! I thought those were just made up for Coltan the Barbarian books!”
“They exist alright,” Twilight growled, “and one of them is inhabiting one of my books.”
She kept pace with the creature as it began to stomp and crash through downtown Ponyville, sending ponies scattering and screaming in its wake. But far from simply crushing the buildings, the monster exuded a strange aura that picked apart any structure nearby, calmly and swiftly disassembling and reassembling everything from to picket fences into eerie facsimiles of ever larger limbs, fingers, and something resembling a leering, evil face.
“You call this interior decorating?! I will show you the beauty of real organization!” it cackled as it ripped Lyra and Bon Bon’s house straight from its foundations and separated every door frame, table, and piece of closet clutter into precisely measured structural support for its growing body. The two mares only narrowly avoided being pulled up into the crush as the rest of the homes on their block suffered the same fate. “I will make sense of this chaos! It will all exist within me, gloriously harmonious. Feng shui will have nothing on me. All of this madness will be brought to heel, and you will thank me in the end.”
Even as it spoke, the demonic presence went to work. Bicycle wheels and blankets were tied together and turned into crude pulleys and gears, street lamps to giant coupling rods, stairs into turbine vanes powered by falling bowling balls. Conveyer belts delivered anything that couldn’t be used as kinetic power to parts unknown inside the ever-growing mass. It made Button and Rumble’s head spin just to look at the uninterrupted perpetual jumble of motion, none of which had a discernable purpose as far as they could tell.
“Holy Hearth’s Warming!” Rumble shouted. “It’s using all our stuff to keep itself going!”
“A machine,” Twilight muttered darkly. “A giant machine made to create more of itself. All calibrated, pointless perfection, built to no purpose but to grow and operate interminably. Discord would get a real kick out of this.”
“Can’t we just get him to help?” asked Button.
Twilight snorted much more loudly than Button thought necessary. “First of all, Discord’s ‘help’ is anything but, and he’d just take this as an invitation to cause more trouble,” she snapped. “You don’t know him like I do, always turning your apples to oranges and mixing up words in the titles of your books, but it’s cursed so you only notice if you really think about it and then everything is out of order, and—anyway. No, Discord is the absolute last thing in the entire universe who would help. Secondly, knowing him, he’s already watching us from a safe distance laughing his mismatched limbs off. If he wanted in on this action he’d be here already. We’re on our own.”
Twilight juked in front of the creature, launching a beam pure pink energy at its center mass, which happened to be a perfectly octagonal portion of her bedroom wall, but her attack sputtered against the crystal slab. She barely dodged another swing of the demon’s arm, which was several times bigger now that it had the material of six or seven houses glued to it.
“It’s too strong for a counterspell!” Twilight yelled over the roaring slipstream. “We have try and dismantle it from the inside, rip the page it was summoned from right out of the book. As much as it pains me to do that. I’d preserve it if I could.”
“Um, hello?” Button snarked. “It’s a gateway for a giant demon to destroy Equestria, I think we can afford to lose one page?!”
“But how do we get close to that thing?” Rumble asked. “It knows you’re trying to get it now!”
“I can’t fly properly with you two on my back,” Twilight answered, spitefully blasting pieces off the demon even as it quickly repaired itself with more uplifted houses. “We need to get you two some transportation.”
“But what?”
Button flailed his hooves. “Are we really going to ignore the Princess of Friendship almost took the option to fill out the eldritch horror section of her library over saving the world?”
“Almost,” Twilight corrected him. “And by the way, my eldritch horror section was doing just fine until you two troublemakers got your hooves on it.” Button grumbled under his breath as Twilight scanned the ground for anything the monster hadn’t already swept up. Perhaps one of Pinkie’s flying machines, or…
“Davenport! Look out!” Rumble shouted.
The hapless stallion stood in front of his shop, either out of defiance or sheer paralyzing fear as the massive demon rumbled towards him, jittering and staggering under the sheer power of its own machinery and still ranting about how nothing in this town was catalogued or properly indexed. A faceplate made of a frighteningly jagged piece of Twilight’s castle leered down at him and his little shop. For a moment, there was calm between the earth pony and the demon as the rest of Ponyville scattered in hysteria and houses twirled and flew to pieces in midair.
“W-welcome to Davenport’s Quills and Sofas. How may I help you sir?” Davenport squeaked.
The maniacal machine tilted its vast head, considering the tiny pony trembling before it.
Then it reared back and nodded in satisfaction.
“Actually,” it said, “you’re already quite organized. Congratulations! I shall make you my majordomo in the new regime.”
It then daintily stepped over Quills and Sofas before immediately resuming its cackling rampage.
Twilight sputtered. “What! How did it—? It couldn’t! Nopony’s more organized than me, nopony!”
She crashed into the ground on all four hooves, creating a shockwave that sent Button and Rumble flying off her back as she stomped up to Davenport, who shrank further and further into what he hoped was obscurity.
“It took my home,” she snarled, “it stole my assistant, and it’s ruined my library. But now it has the gall, the utter gall to say that somepony else is more organized than me?! Sparing a retail shop over my home? Saying that I’m not even close to its arbitrary standards? I’m more organized than anypony! I’m practically the alicorn of checklists! The nerve!”
She got right up in Davenport’s face and bellowed, “The absolute nerve!”
“Y-yes!” the poor stallion quailed. “Th-the nerve! N-now how can I help you, P-P-Princess?”
Twilight sniffed disdainfully as she looked over his untouched inventory.
“I need some sofas.”
Rumble decided that he very much liked flying under his own power rather than being scooted along by something else. Still, he had to admit that he was still rather small for a pegasus, and his wings couldn’t be expected to reach the velocity required for Twilight’s plan. He looked over at the alicorn, and winced at her deadly glare, even though it was pointed straight ahead at the back of the demon machine and not at him. They were somewhere over Whitetail Woods, with Ponyville’s outskirts left behind; the demon marched much faster than they thought.
His little heart fluttered. Technically, they were now responsible for obliterating their home town. But, technically, they were now bravely charging into battle to save it. He hoped Scootaloo and Thunderlane and everypony else was all right; the monster hadn’t been concerned with hurting ponies so much as berating them on poor fashion sense, bad decorating, and awful garden layouts. He wondered, for a moment, if Scootaloo had seen him confronting the monster on the back of an alicorn, and puffed out his little chest a bit more. He felt very brave right now, if he did say so himself, but this was all still kind of his fault. If he was really going to be brave, he’d have to prove it. And that meant apologizing to an angry demigod before the demon he’d unleashed squashed them all and took that chance away.
“You know, Princess Sparkle,” he shouted over the rushing wind. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry for all the trouble I caused you!”
“Dude, what about ‘we?’” Button asked, having to shout despite being less than five feet away.
“The truly penitent heart speaks for itself,” Rumble said sagely.
Button groaned. “So persnickety.” He leaned over and yelled at Twilight. “Hey Miss Sparkle, I’m sorry for blowing up Ponyville!”
Twilight didn’t answer, flapping her wings steadily as she glared straight ahead.
“Are you still mad at us?” asked Button.
Twilight continued to glare.
“Is it because we trashed your house?”
Still glaring.
“Is it because we snuck into your super secret stash of ultra-dangerous magic books?”
Glaring was the only reply he got.
“Is it because we cast the one spell in the whole book that could have caused the most amount of trouble in the least amount of time?”
Twilight rolled her eyes in the manner of one who couldn’t believe they were still hearing noises from an annoying thing that was very obviously being ignored.
“Is it because we’ve basically lost all credibility since we unleashed a monster that organizes stuff instead of actually destroying anything?”
Twilight zoomed ahead, out of earshot. Button growled and crossed his little hooves over his chest. “Man, it’s not like we’re trying to be annoying. Can’t she tell how sincere we are?”
“We are kind of responsible for something legitimately terrible this time,” Rumble muttered.
“Only kind of!” Button countered. “I mean, let’s split it fifty-fifty between us and the demon. Then fifty-fifty between you and me! So that’s… like half of half a half portion of guilt for each of us.”
Rumble sighed and put his hoof on his forehead. “That’s… not how it works, Button.”
“Regardless!” the other colt barked. “I tried. I bet Twilight just doesn’t like kids. That’s why she didn’t think we were being serious.”
Rumble rubbed his chin. “I think our credibility suffers more because we’re flying second-hoof furniture into battle than anything else.”
Button sighed and looked down at his chaise lounge chair, which was rather unimpressive even zooming three hundred feet in the air, then back to Rumble’s oversized, ugly, grey leather sofa.
“Yeah, you’re probably right.”
“All right, boys, heads up!” Twilight shouted over her shoulder. “That thing’s got a grudge against me personally, so I’ll be distracting it while you get inside and tear the page from that book. With all the sofas we’ve accumulated, they should soften the blow of breaching its torso. I’ve animated the furniture with Lily Lilac’s Lively Hop spell, so just point them where you want to go and they’ll follow. I suggest that weak point made of Jonagold’s fruit stand.”
“Wait, breaching?” Button asked. “Like, going really fast and crashing into something breaching?”
Twilight rolled her eyes. “What, do you think I’m just going to ask it politely to allow saboteurs on board? Just ball yourselves up, get ready, and when you get inside, be prepared for anything!”
“Shouldn’t we be getting some equipment or something first?” Rumble whimpered, trying to hide under the arm of his sofa.
“Oh, sure,” said Twilight, putting her hoof on her chin, “let’s just run back to my house where all my magical equipment is—oh, right, it’s part of the giant monster that you unleashed on the town!”
“Point made.” Rumble sighed as they went into a steep dive, directly behind the demon’s left shoulder.
“Hey, tall, dark, and tasteless!” Twilight shouted, amplifying her shout with the Royal Canterlot Voice. “It’s your favorite librarian!”
“FOOL!” the demon shouted back, making the earth around it rumble with the force of its bellowing. “I left you alive specifically so you could watch me correct your mistakes. Starting with that city on the horizon.” It pointed to Canterlot with a massive finger, which was promptly blown apart with a blast of Twilight’s magic.
“Graaagh!” the demon screeched, reeling back as it ponderously swung out its club-like arms at the buzzing alicorn. “You will pay for that, puny Princess!”
Button shook his head as he watched the epic battle, aiming his lounge chair down at what appeared to be a deltoid muscle made of drywall, tent rope, and a fruit stand. “This is so awesome,” he whispered as the wind twirled his beanie propellor into a blur.
Button curled up against the arm of his lounge chair. His valiant steed seemed to brace for impact as cushions and pillows swarmed around Button and Rumble, giving them only darkness to see and loud noises to hear. First there was a bang, like a cannon being fired, and the sudden, shrieking noise of tearing wood and shattered glass. they felt themselves tumbling, spinning, and finally crashing to a halt against a large wooden platform, and the living cocoon of pillows collapsed into a downy pillow.
Button was first to surface, pumping his hooves. “That was AWESOME!” he cheered. “Let’s do it again! Again!”
“Button,” Rumble peeped, poking Button with his wing as he emerged. “Look.”
Button looked. All around them was a dizzying menagerie of moving parts, endless rows of conveyer belts and makeshift boilers and steam engines, pulleys and cranks and gears all turning and twisting in on each other. It was maddening to see and worse to hear. Turbines pumped and boilers hissed, parts clanged and clanked out a hideous, monotonous rhythm of order and industry. The machines powered each other, themselves, or nothing at all, and yet it all seemed to work in a mind-twisting way. The cacophony raged against the two colts.
“I think I see my house from here,” said Button, gaping at the madness before him.
“I see a way up!” Rumble pointed at a series of lifts, carrying piles of junk from a hundred homes to be delivered to incinerators made of ovens and furnaces all smashed together. “Look, up at the top. It’s Twilight’s castle!”
“Or what’s left of it,” Button replied, peering at the crystalline mess of broken tree limbs beyond the incinerator engines. “Spike’s probably up there too.”
“AAAAAAAAHHHHHH!” a faint voice echoed far above.
“Yeah, that sounds like him,” Rumble said, nodding. “Okay, that’s way too far for me to fly us both up. We’ll ride the lifts and use those conveyor belts to cross the furnaces. Even then it’s still pretty far, so I’ll need all my wing strength to get us up to the castle from there. Once we’re inside, we find the library and tear up that book.”
“It’s gonna be a heck of a ride,” Button added. “We’ll need to be light on our hooves.”
They glanced at each other.
“Floor is lava?” asked Rumble.
“Floor is lava,” said Button.
The two colts chose a rising platform each and hopped on, whooping with boyish joy as they ascended to meet their destiny.
———
Missing half their fur and covered in soot, the two colts hooked their hooves over the final ledge and clambered up, panting and gasping for breath. They lay under the shadow of Twilight’s former palace, with the massive doors completely horizontal and firmly shut. Rumble seemed comparatively calm—Button had the jitters and couldn’t stand up on his own four hooves.
“Okay,” Rumble said. “Okay, I think the worst is behind us.”
“Are you kidding?! That was beyond the worst! That was like worse than the worst! That was the most horrible thing that anypony could ever experience!”
“It wasn’t that bad,” Rumble said, shaking ash off his wing.
“The floor was literally lava,” Button replied, flopping onto his stomach, eyes unfocused. “Not really hot, not on fire, it was actual, for real lava that we almost just died in. I’ll never jump on the furniture again, Mom!”
Rumble decided to ignore him. “Just gotta get the door open,” he wheezed, fluttering up to the handle and giving it a mighty tug. “Stand back!” he called as it flopped down with a loud bang.
Button was impressively unmoved, glaring into the dust kicked up by its landing. “Right! So the whole castle is sideways. Not a big deal. I mean, what more could it throw at us?”
“Spikes,” Rumble said, pointing inside.
There were indeed spikes, everywhere they looked, pointing up from the floor and down from the ceiling like a macabre cave system. The jagged remains of the crystal palace had been converted to a devious forest of pointy death.
“Spikes,” Button said, throwing up his hooves. “Of course. Spikes.” He shook his head and trotted inside. “This guy really has it out for us. I mean, I unleashed him from eternal imprisonment from a dusty book; you’d think he’d be a little more grateful.”
“I just hope that this teaches you a valuable lesson about not trying to find the easy way to get respect and attention,” said Rumble, then reached out to put a hoof on his friend’s shoulder. “Button, I just want to say I’m sorry. This went too far a long time ago, and I should’ve said something. If I hadn’t let my moral compass spin out of control thinking only of what ponies could give me, I might have been able to stop all this.”
“Yeah, normally you’re like, my conscience or something,” Button said, looking confused. “I mean, ponies usually expect this kind of behavior from me, not both of us at once. I guess I’m a worse influence than I thought!” He shrugged and hopped through the door, leaving Rumble behind.
The little pegasus blinked owlishly. “That’s… technically correct, but really not the conclusion I was going for,” he muttered as he followed Button inside.
———
Deep inside the very center of the infernal machine in the remains of Twilight’s library, rebuilt into a twisted ghost of its former self, sat the demonic book. Spells and arcane leylines swirled around it, bathing the entire room in a bright purple light. Its pages rustled nervously as it watched Twilight Sparkle through several magical viewing portals. The Princess had yet to press her attack, instead contenting herself with blowing off large chunks of the demon’s stolen body.
“She’s really getting to you, huh?” Spike asked, tucked away in his cage in a little corner. The demon had moved him closer as insurance, in case Twilight needed… convincing to back off.
The demon snarled, deciding to ignore the glib remark. “Behold, little purple creature!” it bellowed. “Behold the remaking of the whole world!”
“Remake the world? You can’t even hit Twilight,” Spike retorted. “She’s dancing loops around you out there.”
“But she dare not destroy me if she does not wish to destroy her own home!” the demon snarled back. The pages of its book rustled again. “And not with you in my clutches, either. She will soon see the superiority of my ways, and when she bows to me, so will all the Princesses.”
“Sheesh, you’re a one-trick pony,” Spike huffed, crossing his arms. “Of all the times to be taken prisoner it had to be by the boring maniac.”
“Order is not boring!” the demon snapped, the light in the room deepening to an ominous, dark mauve. “You will all learn gratitude under my rule.”
“The only thing you’ll be ruling is a kingdom of pain!”
“With a crown jewel of butt-whooping!”
The library door crashed open, revealing Button Mash and Rumble on the other side, posing side-by-side with their hooves out and ready for battle. This was a little difficult given the iron pots they wore on their heads, the thick pillows and cushions they had wrapped around their barrels, and the dozens of pink bandages with purple hearts stuck all over their bodies.
“What is this?!” the demon cried. “How did you manage to penetrate my fortress?”
“With the help of a certain alicorn who you couldn’t let out of your sight,” Rumble said.
“Someone’s a little too easily sidetracked!” said Button.
“Where did you get the rinky-dink costumes?” asked Spike.
Button slapped a hoof over his heart and crossed it three times. “That’s easy! We got lost and found Twilight’s kitchen first, where we cleverly appropriated seemingly ordinary kitchen implements to protect ourselves in the demon’s maze! Then we fell into a spare closet and found the pillows to protect us from the spikes!”
Rumble did a somersault. “And then I deduced that Twilight must keep first aid supplies in her medicine cabinet after we fell through a floor and into her bathroom!”
“I don’t like where this is going, could you just skip ahead?” said Spike.
“And when we got to the library,” said Button as he finished several jumping jacks, “we realized that to maximize the impact of our entrance we needed a snappy comeback and hid outside waiting for the right moment to strike!”
Spike facepalmed as the demon waited in stunned silence. “You mean you just sat out there until you heard something you could make a one-liner out of?”
“For ten whole minutes!”
“I have a question,” said the demon. “Why are you flailing around like that?”
“Oh,” said Rumble, stopping mid-cartwheel. “We were, um… posing. You know, for dramatic effect.”
“ENOUGH!” the demon bellowed, loud enough to make the room shake. “You are but foolish children! You will not stop me! I am immortal! I am order! I am the bedrock of the universe itself!”
“I bet your brain is a rock! That nopony would use as a bed, because it is a rock!” Button retorted.
“AAAAAAH!” the demon raged, and the floor itself exploded under the book, lifting it up on cuboid pieces of crystal and stone. A disjointed golem-like body formed out of the wreckage, with the book itself serving as the head. A table of contents and a swirly author’s signature glared down at Button.
“You may have unleashed me, but I see now that sparing you was folly. You are a blight on this world, an agent of chaos and discord. You will be the first to be destroyed while I purge the earth of your ilk.”
Rumble and Button scattered as a wrecking ball of a hand smashed down on the ground they once stood upon. The golem swiveled on its torso, stretching out its arms until it became a spinning whirligig of death, carving up the room close behind Button’s hooves. The colt squealed as his stubby little legs worked as fast as they could to stay out of imminent doom.
“Hey, ugly!” Rumble shouted, kicking open Spike’s cage. “I hope your face is fireproof!”
Spike let loose with a mighty gout of flame, enveloping the golem in a sparkling emerald conflagration. It quickly sputtered as spells spun in midair to block the dragon’s breath, easily dispersing the awesome heat.
“It is indeed,” the demon sneered as it swung its arm, dislodging a massive chunk of crystal and turning it into a giant projectile that annihilated the bookshelves above Spike and Rumble’s heads. They had time for a single yelp before an avalanche of books smothered them.
The demon turned back to Button. “Now for you.”
Button gulped and backpedaled on his flank, yelping as the demon brought its arms down again and again, inches from the colt’s legs, getting closer with each blow.
“You are a measly and insignificant creature,” it snarled, “playing with forces beyond your ken. You seek shortcuts that bend the earth to your will regardless of consequences. A mere child who will never be more than the quivering bundle of flesh that he is now. You sought to make a slave of me, so your own ego could remain untarnished. And now you will pay the price for your arrogance!”
Button found himself with his back to the wall, curling up into as tight a ball as he could, as if that might stave off the last crushing blow. As the demon loomed over him, raising its jagged fist, he felt something he usually didn’t stinging the corners of his eyes. It was wet and warm and he squeezed his eyelids shut until it ran down his cheeks.
“You’re right,” he whimpered.
His voice, perhaps how weak or how defeated it sounded, gave the demon momentary pause.
“You’re right about everything,” Button said. “This isn’t cool or awesome or helpful. This isn’t about me. It’s about the town I just wrecked. It’s about the ponies I put in danger just because I was bored and I couldn’t stand being second-best to anyone. I’m not the kind of pony who solves problems. I make them and then think that just because I’m such a cool guy it’ll fix itself. I did this all because I was jealous!” He glared up at the demon, gritting his teeth as tears flowed freely. “I was jealous, okay?! I saw how the Crusaders just got everything right, all the time, and I couldn’t help myself. I just wanted to be something bigger and better than Button Mash, the weird kid who nopony looks up to! But instead I couldn’t even get that right, because I made you, and you couldn’t care less about my problems, so what’s the point? What’s the point of saying sorry or, or wishing I could take it all back and just be boring again? What’s the point of trying to pretend I'm something I'm not? Just go ahead and smash me if you think that’ll really make the world a better place.”
The silence hung in the air like the demon’s fist. Everything hung still for a fragile, precious moment.
“All right,” said the demon with a shrug, and brought its fist down.
Or that’s what it would have done if the wall above Button hadn’t suddenly exploded into a ball of very angry alicorn.
“GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!” Twilight shrieked as she barreled into the golem’s body, sending it flying across the library and crashing into the far wall, leaving a massive crater. Before the demon could even gather its senses, Twilight smashed into it again, driving it deeper into the wall. The book flew from its perch on the golem’s head, skidding across the floor. Twilight zoomed forward, trying to grab it, but a hand made of crystal lunged up from the floor itself, snatching the book from her reach. A second hand closed around Twilight, pinning her down as she blasted at it with magic.
“You are no longer my master, you foal!” the demon snarled, building another, even bigger body for itself. “You are all ignorant children, and I will be your teacher.”
It raised the hand that held the Princess until she was level with the book. The very page that had summoned the ancient presence seemed to glare at her, taunting Twilight with how close it was, how it blocked her magical grip with its fell powers.
“This broken world requires my guidance. My help. If you cannot help yourselves, then I shall do it for you.”
“No thanks,” said Button as he hopped up on a shoulder made of marble wall panels. “You’re nothing but my mess. And it’s time to clean you out!”
Before anyone could react, Button grabbed the page, and gave a little tug that wasn’t even with all his might. He just leaned forward, took hold, and yanked back, taking the page with him.
And then it was over.
The evil magic dissipated. The golem collapsed into a pile of rubble. Twilight broke free with a brush of her wings, and caught Button as he fell, setting them both gently on the ground.
Button glared down at the piece of paper that had caused so much trouble. The glow around the letters faded, but the hatred that emanated from it could not be denied. So long as this spell existed, it could be a portal for the monster within to return.
“Huh. Poor guy didn’t know who he was messing with,” he said, and with contemptuous ease, tore the page in two.
There was a burst of light like a candle burning up very suddenly, and the taste of beets and bitter hatred on the air. And then it was gone too.
Twilight finished the job, burning the two halves and stomping on the ashes.
“I don’t think anypony really knows how to deal with you, Button Mash,” she said, halfway between respect and aggravation. She flung away the books holding Spike and Rumble prisoner, watching them stagger dazedly over to her. “I heard what you said, by the way. It doesn’t fix all our houses or change what happened, but, for what it’s worth…”
She laid a wing over his beanie cap. “I’m proud of you for owning up to all that. You were willing to take the ultimate fall for Equestria. It may not have been the best thing to do, but it's to your credit that you even said it at all.”
Button sniffled. “Yeah… wait a minute. That means you were just sitting outside eavesdropping on my confession?!”
“Waiting for the moment to maximize the impact of my entrance, I think you’d say,” Twilight said with an insolent grin.
Before anyone could say another word, the entire structure shuddered beneath them, and books fell from their shelves. Cracks appeared in the walls and the entire machine groaned horribly.
“Oh no,” said Twilight. “It’s coming apart! Everyone, grab on!”
She enclosed the boys in the circle of her wings, and with a flash of her horn, all of them blinked into the open air above the infernal walking factory as it came apart piece by piece, littering the Equestrian countryside with the detritus of Ponyville. The noise was deafening as an entire town’s worth of belongings all came down at once, kicking up a plume of dust that nearly swallowed the onlookers, even as they took shelter on a cloud.
Twilight helpfully cast a spell of air-walking on the ones without wings, and watched impassively as her house and everypony else’s went up in smoke.
“Wow,” said Rumble. “From Diamond Tiara’s mansion to all of Ponyville. I think we’ve hit some kind of record.”
“At least this means I don’t have to alphabetize my comic book collection anymore,” Spike said with a wistful sigh.
Button Mash sat back on his flanks, looking miserable.
“Well,” said Twilight. “In the end, they’re all just things. It’s a miracle, but I didn't sense any ponies in all that mess. We’ll rebuild.”
She looked over her shoulder as Rumble sat down next to Button, the both of them contemplating what would happen next.
“You boys were brave,” she said. “Staggeringly inept, loathsomely egotistical, and completely at fault for everything that just happened, but… brave. You caused a problem, but then helped by taking responsibility and fixing it again. Not many ponies have the fortitude to do that.”
“Thanks, Princess. It will be our balm when the burning arrows of guilt come flying down,” Rumble muttered.
“I just wish there was a way we could help now,” said Button. “Not like we can just get a broom and touch up a destroyed Ponyville.”
“Aw, don’t be so glum,” said Spike. “Twilight’s probably got some spell that’ll sweep this whole mess under the cosmic rug, and everything will go back to normal by next week.”
“First of all,” Twilight growled, “that is a gross oversimplification of the intricacies of magic itself. Second… maybe. Yes. There could in fact be a spell that would fix this.”
“Really?” asked all three boys at once.
Twilight winced. “Uh, well, it… it’s complicated. And probably more trouble than it’s worth, but—”
“But even the most capricious of spirits can grant a boon once in awhile,” said Discord, uncoiling himself from the very cloud matter beneath their feet. He looked far too pleased with everything, grinning like the mad fool he was. “Hello, hello, my little friends! I see you vanquished that stuffy old beast once and for all!”
“Discord!” Twilight snapped. “How long were y—”
“Maximizing impact, etcetera,” Discord said, pressing a paw to Twilight’s lips that turned into a stop sign. “The point is, I was watching that hi-LARIOUS show from Fluttershy’s cottage window while getting my daily deep-tissue massage from Barry the Bear, and I must say I am impressed with these two foals you have here, Twilight! What did you say their names were? Babble and Ruckus? Well those are my new names for you anyway.” He twined his serpentine body between Rumble and Button, growing an extra head so he could look at them both.
“Why, I’ve never seen so much delicious chaos caused in such a short amount of time since last week when I had too much cider at Pinkie’s birthday,” he crooned. “Of course I would have stepped in to help, but I got the strangest burning sensation on the back of my neck like somepony was disparaging my good name!” He put his arms around Button and Rumble’s shoulders, smirking at Twilight from between them. “And of course I am far too polite to go where I’m obviously not wanted.”
Twilight crossed her hooves and pouted ferociously.
“So why did you come here now?” Spike asked.
“Well, to give these boys my congratulations!” Discord said, rising up. A bundle of firework rockets followed him and shot into the air, exploding into technicolor depictions of Button and Rumble’s smiling faces. “I was wondering if there was ever going to be somepony who could liven up this town the way I do! I mean, I thought Diamond Tiara’s house was just a fluke… a little extreme, but I liked it nevertheless. And then this!” He raised his hands again, and the entire world was drenched in the grainy paper of a comic book, and Button and Rumble saw giant boxes fill up with Discord’s own words as heavily stylized (and much more buff) versions of them re-enacted the battle between them and the demon of Order.
“There was action, drama, a gut-wrenching confession! A whole town up in smoke—not destroyed, but reorganized! Oh, the crushing irony of it all! There was an Action Princess who didn’t take guff from nopony, and plucky sidekicks in need of rescuing!”
“Hey!” the much scrawnier rendition of Spike said from inside his heavily-inked cage.
“And there were two little colts who had to face up to their own limitations and overcome them to save the day!”
Comic book Button looked down at his spandex costume, which sported a giant, stylized ‘B’ on his chest. He turned and blew on his cape to try and give his stance a more heroic air, then went back to posing over the remains of the defeated demon.
Comic book Rumble stood perfectly still next to him, sweating profusely as all the fillies of Ponyville—including a heart-eyed Scootaloo—clung possessively to his legs.
“And best of all, lessons were learned and nopony was hurt,” Discord said, clapping his hands and closing the book. The real world returned abruptly, leaving everyone except for Discord quite dazed.
“I can’t thank you boys enough for letting me know that this town is in good hooves when I’m not around to help it along,” Discord said, wiping crocodile tears that were actually from an eyedrop labeled ‘Crocodile Tears’ from his eyes. “Oh, you’ve helped this lonely heart find happiness in the downtime between chaotic outbursts.”
“Help!?” Twilight sputtered. “You think they helped by destroying everything? I was just congratulating them on actually coming forward and apologizing!”
“Yes, well, when Ponyville is in the iron grip of the Princess of Guilt-Trips, apologies are also important,” Discord huffed. “In any case, since you ponies seem so bent on having things nice and neat and blech orderly, I have decided that I will grant you…” He turned and put a finger on each of Button and Rumble’s noses. “... Two wonderful favors. The first I think is obvious given my near-total control over the fabric of reality, but the second…”
He grew a disturbingly large grin that nearly split his face in two. “Oh, let that one be a surprise.”
Button and Rumble looked at each other warily as Discord snapped his fingers.
The entire world went white.
When the light faded, they were back in the living room of Button Mash’s house, totally untouched by demonic influence. Everything was exactly how they remembered it. Outside, birds were singing and ponies were milling about in confusion, wondering why the town that had just been destroyed suddenly wasn’t anymore. Twilight’s castle stood firm over it all, and if they looked closely, they thought they could see the Princess herself glaring at them from her bedroom window.
Also, as Button’s Mom and Thunderlane were already explosively telling them, they were grounded.
Author's Note
I love writing Discord.
Rumble always liked lunchtime at school. It was nice to sit under the sun and let it warm his wings as he relaxed on the bench running along the schoolhouse wall and studied his schoolmates. The other foals were fascinating, each huddling into their own little groups with their own little goals and objectives. They came together, clashed, and fell apart again like colliding air currents. He got to see a microcosm of pony society while he ate the marmalade and peanut butter sandwich his older brother Thunderlane traditionally made for him.
But today something was missing; another tradition that Rumble had taken part in since the day he moved to Ponyville and sat on this very bench.
Where was Button Mash?
The other colt was Rumble’s best friend and go-to playmate since kindergarten, the one pony with whom Rumble had shared more time and secrets than Thunderlane. They became so more from the fact that Rumble was the only pony who could stand being near Button rather than them having more in common than a love of video games and being shunned by the other foals as boring and weird. Usually the the background buzz of Button going on about his latest adventure in The Call of Warkill World or how he unlocked some secret combo in Vorpal Conflict for the umpteenth time would complement the pony-watching nicely. Today, Button wasn’t even visible on the playground even though they’d just been sitting next to each other in class ten minutes ago.
Oh well. Button would show up sooner or later. The sun was nice and warm and the Cutie Mark Crusaders were livening things up with a demonstration of their next big plan, and Diamond Tiara was doing her best to put down Scootaloo’s new scooter tricks but Scootaloo was being totally cool as always and flipping her hair in that totally awesome way she learned from Rainbow Dash, because only a pony as cool as Scootaloo could have the Rainbow Dash as their mentor.
Rumble pondered getting up and going over there since Button wasn’t around. He imagined himself standing up and smoothing back his mane with some mane gel he snuck out of Thunderlane’s bathroom. He saw himself strutting towards the other children, wings out and feathers perfectly preened, his fur coat glowing in the gentle bloom effect of his imagination. He watched his hoof take Scootaloo by the shoulder and spin her around in slow motion like Thunderlane did with mares when he wanted to sweep them off their hooves. Scootaloo’s mane billowed in a convenient breeze as she turned.
Then he realized Scootaloo’s face was Button Mash’s and it was all bloodshot and crying and there was a dribble of snot running down his nose.
“RUMBLE!” the abomination screamed.
“AAAAH!” Rumble screeched, flinging his hooves into the air and his sandwich along with it as he pressed himself against the school wall. “Button! What’s the matter?!”
“This is the worst day ev-er-herrr-herrrrr! You gotta help me!” Button moaned, grabbing Rumble by the shoulders. Rumble shuddered as he realized they were clammy and damp from being wiped across Button’s runny nose.
“Um, uh, okay, don’t worry,” he said, lifting his nose to keep his face away from Button’s as the other colt fell into his chest. Button had a thing about hugging and being hugged when he was in emotional turmoil. “Just remember what I said about sharing your feelings: ‘It’s better to talk and give words a shot than cover your buddies in all your snot!’”
“I can’t help iiiit!” Button groused. “It’s like the time when I finally made it to the last level of Grumpy Griffons and then Miss Cheerilee showed up out of nowhere and took away my Pony Pad!”
Rumble scrunched his brow. “Wait, wasn’t that just last period? When we had the math test?”
“I tried to tell her calculating trajectories to knock griffons off of stuff counted as math but she wouldn’t listen. And now I have nothing! Nothing to distract me from my grief! I’m just a child, I shouldn’t have to suffer like this so early!”
“Dude, I really don’t wanna smack sense into you, you’re kinda gross and sticky at the moment,” Rumble said. “So just take some deep breaths and explain to me carefully what’s the matter.”
Button smushed their faces together as he pointed a hoof into the distance, highlighting Rainbow Dash furiously punching a cloud that wouldn’t disperse.
“It all started long ago,” whispered Button. “Before the time known as… breakfast.”
Earlier
Button looked up at his mother over his bowl of cereal.
“Mom,” he squeaked with his mouth full so he could make his cheeks as chubby and adorable as possible, “I wanna buy Vorpal Conflict 6.”
“No,” said Button’s Mom.
Button spewed his mouthful of cereal over the table, his mom’s breakfast, and his mom. “But that isn’t faaaaair!” he caterwauled. “Why? By the twin moons of Mulgor, whyyyyyy?!”
He fell from his chair and started rolling back and forth, bawling as loud as he could. He didn’t stop as his mother dropped his backpack on him, rolled him out the door onto the dirt path uphill from the schoolhouse, and let him gain momentum from there.
“Huh,” said Rumble, “that explains why your pelt looked more brown than usual this morning. And why there’s a crack in the schoolhouse door now.”
“I gotta have that game, man! I gotta have that game!” Button said, scrunching their noses together. “Do you know how many times I’ve beaten Vorpal Conflict one through five?!”
“Seventy-three and a half times,” Rumble answered. “I know because I was player two that whole run.” He sniffled and looked away. “I’m always player two.”
Button started shaking Rumble with increasing intensity as he babbled on, his eyes tinged with madness. “I know every combo, every secret, and unlocked every alternate character costume. I know the lore backwards and forwards. I even started writing theories on what will happen next! The series has lost its luster for me, man! I’ve gone stir crazy waiting for the next installment and now the only thing standing between you, me, and adrenaline pumping gore-soaked madness is the she-devil lording over my house!”
Button dropped Rumble, who grabbed his head to stop the supersonic shivering of his brain, blinking as his eyes rattled in their sockets. “Don’t you think you’re overreacting?” he asked. “That game just came out two days ago, right? I’m sure Missus Mom will get it for you for Hearth’s Warming or something.”
Button whined. “Hearth’s Warming is still three months away! I’ll never make it!” He smacked his hooves together. “I gotta get that game now or future me will never forgive myself!”
“I have an idea!” Rumble squeaked.
“Ooo! Is it to sneak into the game shop after hours and fight the town’s nightwatch pony with laser swords?”
Rumble blinked. “No.”
“Is it to go on an epic quest to find the game developers and get them to give us a copy after we fight them with laser swords?”
Rumble’s eyes narrowed. “No.”
“Oh! Oh! Is it to go to Princess Twilight and tell her that if we don’t get that game it’ll ruin our friendship and she can go tell Mom to buy it for us for the sake of Harmony?”
“No!” Rumble squeaked, throwing his hooves in the air. “I was going to say how about we go around Ponyville asking all the ponies if they have things we can do for them, and we ask for bits as a reward! Then once we have enough we’ll go and get the game ourselves. That way Missus Mom and Thunderlane will be impressed with how responsible we are and will have no choice but to admit that since we earned the money we can decide how to spend it.”
Button stared at Rumble, who stared at Button. Then tears burst from Button’s eyes and he fell into Rumble’s hooves again.
“I’m never gonna get that gaaaaaaame!” he wailed, loud enough to attract unwanted attention.
“Hey, losers!” Diamond Tiara snapped as she trotted over to them, accompanied by her lackey Silver Spoon. “What is the humungo deal with you? We can hear you across the schoolyard!”
“Yeah!” chimed in Silver Spoon. “It’s, like, super annoying.”
Diamond nodded. “Not to mention totally cutting into our witty put-downs of the other students! Rumble, can’t you control your snotty little friend?”
“He’s not snotty!” Rumble shot back, curling his hooves protectively around Button’s head. “And he’s not just my friend! He’s like my brother and I have to support him. He’s just going through a hard time right now. There, there, Button.” He patted down Button’s mane, trying to ignore the trail of mucous slowly trailing down his chest. He wasn’t about to crack in front of a bully like Diamond though. Not when everypony (and especially Scootaloo) was watching. But the mucous was really cold and runny and oh goodness it was leaking into his belly button.
“What could possibly be so terrible that Button Mash’s face would turn even uglier than usual?” said Diamond Tiara.
“Don’t be so mean!” said Rumble. “Button’s not ugly and he’s not uglier than usual. Show her, Button.”
Button lifted his face and hissed through red and swollen nostrils, blubbering as a snot bubble rose from his snout and tears dribbled down puffy cheeks.
“Okay stop showing her,” said Rumble as he tucked Button’s face under his wing.
“Oh wait! Let me guess,” Diamond sneered. “It has to do with something really lame and dumb and weird that only a dumb colt like Button Mash would care about, and he’s totally overreacting about it because—”
She squeaked as Button lashed out and grabbed her by the tiara, screaming into her face. “The new Vorpal Conflict game just came out two days ago and even though I’ve already bought and finished the rest of the series and it’s at a completely reasonable price for an exclusive Ponystation release Mom won’t let me have it and it’s driving me CRAZY! I’m not overreacting! You! Are! UNDERREACTING!”
Diamond stared into Button’s wild eyes and took a moment to breathe, salvaging her dignity as she shoved him away and produced a handkerchief to wipe away Button’s spittle. “A video game? Who even needs video games? Besides weirdos like you of course. I wouldn’t waste a single bit on one of those.”
“That’s right!” said Button, throwing himself at Diamond’s hooves. “But… you’d waste bits on me, right? Because, you know, you just have so many to spare and I’m in such great need and all…”
“Ha!” said Diamond Tiara, making sure to turn up her nose just the way her Daddy showed her.
“Ha!” Silver Spoon mimicked her, because that was all she ever did.
“As if!” Diamond continued. “My Daddy’s fortune is too great to be wasted on common ponies like you.” She leveled a hoof at Button, then pointed at Rumble. “And you.” She swung around to the rest of the schoolchildren. “And especially all of you! I wouldn’t even let you pick that video game out of my trash after I buy it and throw it away, which I am going to do right after school.”
“But… you said you wouldn’t waste a single bit on that game,” said Rumble.
“Uh, duh!” Diamond said, sticking her tongue out. “Of course I won’t. My personal butler is going to get it for me. Then I’ll just stick it in my room with the rest of the junk that you all will never be able to have. Literally the only good reason to be rich is to get the stuff that nopony else can, so you can say that you have it and nopony else does.” She sighed with faux-despair and flicked her mane back with her hoof. “Oh, it’s just so hard to find anything else worthwhile to do with my time in this podunk town. Anywho, toodles, losers! I’m off to go and buy happiness while you waste away in your puddles of discontent.”
She turned to make her exit, and for the extra condescension she flipped her mane again, tossing her head back as hard as she could.
There was an audible crack.
Everypony on the playground winced as Diamond stood rigid with her skull almost parallel to her back, staring straight up into the air with a look of barely restrained vexation.
“Silver Spoon!” she hissed, pointing in a nonspecific direction. “Tsst!”
Silver Spoon blinked.
Diamond’s hoof stabbed the air. “Tsssssst!”
Silver Spoon gasped. “Oh! Right.” She dutifully planted her hooves on Diamond’s bottom and pushed, making sure to turn and give Rumble and Button the most disparaging raspberry she could manage while shoving her ringleader across the playground by the cutie marks.
“Man,” said Rumble, “why do they have to be so cruel?” He stared at his solemn reflection in the pool of Button’s tears around his hooves. “I’m really feeling that puddle of discontent right about now.”
Button ignored him, sucking in another tail of phlegm dangling from his nose before spitting it back out in another roar. “I gotta have that gaaaaame! Did you hear her, Rumble? This is the perfect opportunity! We’ll follow her after school and when she and her scummy butler walk out of the store, we jump them and claim what is rightfully ours. It’ll be just like episode thirty-four of Brawn-Star, Hero of the Everfree! I’ll finally have a reason to break out that authentic Brawn-Star Battle Axe© (complete with faux-Cragodile leather grip) I got from that raffle at the convention!”
“First of all,” Rumble said with all the patience he could muster, “that would be assault in broad daylight. Secondly, that axe-thing is so heavy that even both of us combined couldn’t lift it and it sank your house’s foundation. And thirdly, even if we did manage to steal the game everypony would know that we’re the only ones in town desperate and pathetic enough to try something like that. And I shouldn’t have to mention that you’d be stealing something!”
Silence.
“That’s bad,” said Rumble.
“Uh huh,” said Button with a tiny nod.
Rumble sighed and his face fell into a deadpan expression. “You’re already thinking about how to get that game without being caught, aren’t you?”
“Uh huh.”
“And you know I’ll go along with it because deep down I’m desperate to play it too, don’t you?”
“Uh huh.”
“And you’re just nodding and going ‘uh huh’ because I lost you when I started talking about why this won’t work, aren’t you?”
“Uh huh.”
A beat of silence.
“Just tell me what you have in mind,” said Rumble.
Button Mash and Rumble peeked over the roof of the local game store in Ponyville’s town square, clad in what they termed ‘the latest in tactical operations gear.’ That it was all found underneath their beds and in the backs of their closets wasn’t relevant to the fact that Button made a black sweater and wool beanie look awesome. He unfurled the spool of rope he brought, tugging on it to test its strength.
Rumble, the hood of his all-black hoodie strung tight around the baby fat on his cheeks, was worried.
“Are we sure this is going to get us the game?”
“Of course!” said Button. “Now that we look like operators nopony will be able to tell who we are. We distract the butler with the secret formula, drop down using this rope I brought, snatch the game from his saddlebag while he’s incapacitated by the fumes, and we’re out before anypony even knows we were there. I can’t wait to see the look on Diamond’s face when that game never even shows up at her door!”
“I dunno,” said Rumble, fiddling with his hoodie strings. “I’d feel marginally less bad if we were stealing it directly from Diamond Tiara, but the butler? She said she was using his money to buy it, and being in a servant’s position and at around the same socioeconomic strata as we are, I can’t help but feel like we’re perpetuating a cycle of predation and violence instead of exacting justice on those who abuse their financial gifts.”
Button stared at him in the way most of the town stared at Princess Twilight when she was trying to convince them that the next apocalypse was coming and this time it really was something to worry about, unlike the last five times.
“Yeah, but if we get it now we won’t have to wait until later.”
Rumble dropped his chin on the edge of the roof. “If only the truth wasn’t so appealing.”
“So,” said Button. “Did you bring… The Goods?”
Rumble reached into his saddlebag (also hastily spray-painted black) and pulled out a jar of greyish, greenish paste. “It was a little trouble getting the measurements right, but fortunately the back of our fridge had plenty to work with. Thunderlane only cleans it out when I tell him the social worker’s back in town.”
“It looks so cool! I can’t help but wonder if this might be over the top though,” said Button, peeking into the jar.
“What makes you say that?” asked Rumble.
“Meh, probably just a feeling,” Button replied as he watched his reflection choke and die from the awful mixture within. “What’s in it?”
“Mould from the fridge, sweat from Thunderlane’s workout routine, hair from the tub, old pizza from when we moved into Ponyville, and some bog water from Fluttershy’s Habitat for Hydras.”
“Perfect,” whispered Button. “Oh, get down! Here he comes!”
They ducked beneath the neon letters of the shop, listening to Diamond’s butler hum happily and then the jingle of the doorbell as he trotted inside.
“Ready?” said Button. “Operation Wombo Combo is a go!”
“I’m not sure about this, dude!” Rumble said through gritted teeth, starting to shake as he clutched the jar to his chest. “What if we get caught? What if we go too far? What if this is just the start of some horrible crime spree beneath the thin veneer of vengeful altruism? We should abort now and go home while we still have our dignity!”
Button punched him in the shoulder. “And tell our Ponystation we came back empty-hoofed? That the rest of the Vorpal Conflict family will have to go to sleep at night knowing there’s an empty spot on the shelf when we could have brought their brother home?! Pull yourself together, soldier! This operation cannot be terminated!”
Rumble’s teeth chattered as they waited in dread silence for the tell-tale jangle of the doorbell. Seconds trickled by like molasses. The sun beat down on them. Button Mash felt his heart hammering in his chest. Soon they’d have what Diamond and his mom and the general state of foals in the Equestrian economy would keep from them. Soon they would be soaked in the gory, high definition ultra-violence of Vorpal Conflict 6.
Bells rang in his ears as the butler came back outside. He slapped Rumble’s shoulder.
“NOW!”
Rumble whispered a quick prayer of forgiveness to Celestia and lobbed the jar of grody nastiness over his head. Button watched as it sailed overhead, catching the light of the sun. It disappeared over the edge of the roof, on the way to meet its destiny. That meeting began and ended with a loud thud and the yelp of a very surprised pony.
“Package has been delivered! Go go go!” Button said. He grabbed one end of the rope in his hoof, dropped the rest over the side without attaching it to anything, and jumped after it.
Another loud thud signaled the end of Button’s first attempt at abseiling.
Rumble flew down a moment later and found two ponies in a mangled heap of butler and Button. The jar was unbroken nearby, the butler wasn’t moving, and Button lay face-down on the ground in an indent about half an inch deep.
Rumble let out a shriek somewhere between ‘microphone feedback’ and ‘frightened pig.’ “Oh no! Oh man! Oh no! Oh man!” he babbled, zipping between both ponies. “What have I done? I killed them! I’m a murderer! What have I done?! I’m so sorry! I let the allure of material gains cloud my better judgment! Oh, why didn’t my brother raise me better?!”
He collapsed into a sobbing heap next to the prone bodies, blubbering until he noticed a game box poking out of the butler’s saddlebag. His eyes went wide as he snatched it up, preparing to hurl it against the wall and break the disc inside to a thousand pieces. “No! This is all on you! You made me do this! Curse you! Curse your wicked, corrupting influence! I’ll never let you soil another friendship again you terrible—wait a minute, this isn’t the game we wanted.”
Button pried his face out of the divot his face had made in the dirt. “It’s not?!” he sputtered through swollen lips and a black eye, spraying grass and dirt out of his mouth. “Then what the heck did we go to all this trouble for?”
Rumble held the game box at arm’s length. “The Ponies? Oh, weird. It’s one of those games where you watch ponies and make them learn housekeeping and stuff.”
“Who would even buy that?” Button grumbled, swatting the box out of Rumble’s grip. “What a mess! We just wasted our entire afternoon.”
“Ex-cuse me!” the butler snapped, sitting up and rubbing his head. “Are you the two hooligans who just assaulted me?”
“Whoa!” said Button. “I thought you were dead.”
“I might as well be. Now give me that.” The butler snatched the game back from Button, jowels all aquiver with anger. “And don’t think I didn’t hear what you said. A pony can have his own interests outside of his job, you know!”
“So you’re a butler who plays games about… butlering? Like taking care of ponies after you take care of ponies all day?” said Button, picking blades of grass out of his mane. “Sheesh, dude, what’s even the point?”
“Stop stop stop!” said Rumble. “We have to apologize for what we did, Button. Mister Butler sir, we’re sorry for dropping a jar on your head, but we were desperate! Diamond Tiara said she was sending you to buy the new Vorpal Conflict game and we were on a mission to intercept it for the greater good!”
“Also for the last empty space on my game shelf,” added Button.
The butler scoffed. “I was forced to pick up that abysmal waste of megabytes in the middle of dusting down Sir Rich’s trophy case. You’d better believe I didn’t waste time retrieving it; it was straight here and then back home. After my shift was over I came back to reward myself with a little electronic entertainment of my own.” He raised a severe eyebrow. “And then you dropped a jar on my head.”
“Only to use you to try and hurt Diamond Tiara!” Button said, holding his hooves up in a pleading gesture. “Please don’t tell my mom! She’ll kill me! And then she’ll kill Rumble! And then she’ll kill Thunderlane for not being a better example to Rumble and making sure he has better friends than me!”
The butler sighed and rolled his eyes. “While I am tempted to do nothing short of press charges, I can empathize with a fellow consumer of videographical divertissement. I’ll refrain from tattling on you rapscallions if you don’t let it get out that I’m about to tell you where your quarry is.”
“Deal!” both colts squeaked.
“Wait,” said Rumble. “Why are you helping us to get back at Diamond Tiara after we almost turned you into a biological hazard?”
“Help you? Young sir, that game is buried at the bottom of miss Tiara’s toy chest by now, long-forgotten and never to be opened again. Short of an act of criminality, you’re never getting it back. I just thought I should ease your pain by telling you you never had a chance of acquiring it.”
“Oh, man!” Button groused. “That’s so lame! Now how am I supposed to waste the rest of the weekend?!”
The butler harumphed and walked away. “That, as the young foals say, is not my problem. Good day.”
Button Mash buried his face in his hooves. Short of the time Sweetie Belle caused him to lose all his progress at Apple Smashers by singing at him, this had to be the worst day ever. “Man, we’re never getting that game now!”
“Yeah,” said Rumble, plopping onto his flanks and picking up the jar. “And I went through so much trouble to put this together. Oh, well. Maybe I’ll just put it back in the fridge. Guess we might have to wait for Hearth’s Warming after all.”
"Unless," said Button, "we remember... the Oath."
Rumble gasped, clutching the jar tight to his chest. "We haven't spoken of that since second grade! The Oath is like... a bazillion years old!"
"And it's also legally binding," said Button. "Don't forget... the Contract."
"The Contract?" Rumble squeaked. "We haven't pulled that out in, like, two bazillion years!"
"Well, the situation is desperate. The worst possible pony has what we need. Our great plan failed. We cannot back out, or all is lost until Hearth's Warming and I'm really not that patient in the first place and I'm really frustrated already. We have to renew the Oath and make this a do or die mission! For our playtime. For our freedom as colts. For our friendship!"
He lifted his wool beanie cap, and then the propellor beanie that popped out from underneath that, and retrieved the yellowed piece of paper resting on his mane.
"Behold," said Button, "the Contract. And upon it... the Oath of Eternal Bro-hood. Now let us read the sacred words once more, and renew the Oath that will keep us from ever failing a task done in the name of bro-ness. Can you feel the power, Rumble?"
Rumble shivered the way he sometimes did when Scootaloo smiled his way. "Definitely."
Carefully unfurling the creased parchment, Button scooted next to Rumble and they solemnly read the squiggly blue crayon transcribed upon it so many years ago.
"Button Mash and Rumble, best friends forever, brothers to the end, members of the Super Duper Second Grade Club, hereby promise to respect, renew, and re... remesmer... rezzuh..."
They trailed off into awkward silence. Button squinted and held the paper closer to his face.
"Is... is that supposed to be an 'S?'"
"I think it's a 'Z,'" said Rumble. "Or maybe an 'F' that threw up on itself."
"Sheesh, my mouthwriting was awful in second grade," said Button. He crumpled up the Contract and tossed it in the nearest waste bin. "We'll revise it to modern standards later. Right now we have to promise ourselves that we won't rest until we have that game!"
Rumble shrugged. "But the butler said it was in Diamond's house. We could still just work off the money; I bet there's loads of jobs around here that'll pay us sixty bits in no time. Sweet Apple Acres is always hiring, and I heard Princess Twilight needs lots of help to keep her castle organized."
Button stuck out his tongue. "Blech! Bucking apples and polishing some giant crystal tree? Where do we go from there, become window washing dressmakers? Do you want to end up like Davenport and his sad little Quills and Sofas shop, doing anything and everything to make a quick bit? No, Rumble! No. We must get that game now or never. In lieu of a legible Contract to read the proper Oath..." He spat on his hoof and held it out to Rumble. "We'll spit shake."
Rumble pursed his lips. On the one hoof, he was just as disappointed as Button and really wanted that game. On the other, it looked like Button was determined to go as far as he needed to to get it, which probably included something borderline illegal. But he had already beaned a helpless old pony with a jar of disgusting fluid with the intent of Robin Hoof-esque thievery. Now that he was already halfway down the rabbit hole to a life of crime, was there such a thing as backing out? It might be best to just go out guns blazing. Maybe Scootaloo was into gruff lawless types.
That and he really really really wanted that game. Like right now.
"All right," he said with a sigh. "I got a bad feeling about this, but..." He spat on his hoof and smushed it against Button's. "I'm with you, bro. Wherever this takes us, I'll be there with you."
"Awesome," said Button, already dragging Rumble along. "Now come on. If we're getting inside that mansion we're going to need all the brainpower we can muster..."
"Wow, that was easy," said Button Mash as they slipped into Diamond Tiara’s mansion under cover of darkness through the doggy flap on the front door, still clad in their black clothes. “It’s a good thing they had this tiny door inside of the bigger one.”
“Yeah,” said Rumble. “And it’s a good thing I can actually fly us and our gear over the gate, too. I didn’t know Diamond had a dog, though. I wonder if she even notices it.”
Button scoffed. “Well, all the more reason to get that game! She won’t even know it’s gone. You got the map, right?”
“Of course.” Rumble reached into his saddlebag and pulled out a roll of construction paper. They laid it down on the polished wooden floor, hooves on their chins as they regarded a schoolcolt’s version of accurate technical blueprints.
“Okay,” said Rumble, “according to the map, Diamond’s room is on the third floor. We follow this squiggly line from the front door through the kitchen, into the hidden staircase behind the library, dodging the room full of lasers, shimmy up the chimney with the giant spike trap at the bottom, exit the ventilation shafts and drop down into the room full of security ponies. After a totally epic fight scene we use the smoke bombs to escape and crash through the door to Diamond’s room where we disable her giant robot death machine.” He pointed at a drawing of a giant robot Diamond Tiara with an angry face trying to step on them. Button made an impressed grunt when he saw the fight ending with him single-hoofedly ripping the circuits out of the death machine.
“Then,” Rumble continued, “we grab the game from the vault and make a run for it before the whole house collapses on us, jumping out the side window before we die in a fiery explosion.” He tapped the crayon drawing that depicted the two of them standing triumphantly on the wreckage of a house and a few dozen ninja ponies, with Diamond crying in one corner of the drawing.
“Why is Scootaloo hanging onto your leg in that last one?” asked Button.
Rumble quickly scribbled her out. “Doing what? I don’t see Scootaloo there. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Button nodded, tapping his chin with his hoof. It was especially impressive how the illustrations followed Rumble’s narrative perfectly, and the moustaches were a nice touch.
He looked at Rumble with an upraised eyebrow. “You just made all this up before we got here, didn’t you?”
Rumble sighed. “Yeah…”
Button rolled the map back up. “Welp! The only thing we can do is sneak around and not get caught. At least we know Diamond’s room really is on the third floor. Now come on, and stay quiet!”
They crept through the massive foyer, jaws dropping at the sheer opulence of the home. Everywhere hung paintings, tapestries, and busts upon the most ornate furniture money could buy. To their young minds it was like visiting the palace in Canterlot.
“This is amazing!” whispered Rumble, wincing as even his most indoor of indoor voices bounced and echoed off the high ceiling. “No wonder Diamond likes to rub her money in our faces. I bet she doesn’t even know what else to do with it.”
“It makes me angry, you know? Button hissed. “I mean, why do some ponies even need all this stuff? Just look at this!”
He pointed down a long hallway full of portraits they turned into. There was nothing else inside except the paintings and some decorative dimmed lights. “What is the point? If it were me in this house, I’d make this into like… a slip-n’-slide made out of syrup! With pancakes at the end!”
“I’d make a big obstacle course,” said Rumble, walking alongside Button and regarding the stoic faces of ponies long gone. “Obstacles made of candy. And pillows all over the walls so I don’t hurt myself bumping into them. Just look at all these pointy bits, you can’t fly anywhere in this house…”
None of them noticed the robotic vrrrr as one of the paintings turned its gaze to follow them.
Filthy Rich snorted as he was awoken by a loud beeping noise near his head. He reached out and grabbed the monitor at his bedside, giving it a good thumping with his hoof until the racket stopped. He peered at the LCD display where two little dots were making their way around the second floor of his house.
“Sugar plum,” he whispered sleepily to his wife, “I don’t mean to alarm you, but I think we have intruders.”
The mare yawned, not even bothering to remove her blinders. “Oh, just release the cyborg hounds and go back to sleep, Filthy.”
Filthy grunted. “All right, all right.” He pushed another button and flung the monitor away, curling back up under the covers.
“But then if you have a huge slide to go between floors, how do you get back up?” asked Rumble.
“With the jungle gym, duh!” said Button.
“Wait.” Rumble put out a hoof to stop Button in his tracks. “Do you hear something?”
“Only the sound of my own voice,” said Button. “I swear we’ve passed this giant room full of ridiculously expensive crockery before.”
Rumble’s ears twitched. “It… it almost sounds like—”
“BARK BARK.”
The two colts turned. At the end of the hallway they'd just come down stood three metal dogs about their height, and just as rotund. In place of ears they had two beeping antennae, and gleaming, pupilless metal eyes reflected the terrified expressions of the colts perfectly. With a loud squeak the one in the middle opened the steel trap-door hinges of its jaws.
It said, "BARK BARK."
"Are those what I think they are?" Button whispered, his voice tight. "Because if they are... I may have just wet my pants from how scary and awesome it is."
"I think I did too," Rumble squeaked back. "Except I don't have pants so I'm gonna have to add vandalism to all the other crimes we committed tonight."
Button gulped. "Okay. They're just dogs. Robot dogs. With stainless steel teeth. And probably adamantium claws. But we can handle this. Remember what Mom said: dogs are like stallions. Just look them in the eye and assert dominance, like Fluttershy."
The cy-dogs' eyes flashed red. With an ominous hiss of pneumatics they crouched in unison and started a low, warbling growl. Button fixed his eyes on the gleaming red of his robot adversaries. He recalled episode seventeen of He-Colt, Master of the Universe, when the titular hero had to stare down a giant bunyip threatening a village of innocent ponies, except Button was about one-tenth the size of He-Colt and Rumble was hardly a village full of swooning mares. But for the Oath, he had to try.
Rumble shivered, looking like he was about to start crying.
Button continued to stare. "Just maintain contact," he whispered, setting his hooves firmly in the velvet carpet.
The dogs broke into a run, their metal paws thumping the ground.
Button stood his ground, opening his eyes as wide as he could. "Must... assert... dominance!"
Rumble put his hooves over his eyes and whimpered.
"I can't look! Is it working?!" he squealed when he heard the pounding metal paws get closer. When he didn't get an answer he opened his eyes and saw Button's tail disappear down another corner further down the hall.
"Hey! Not cool!"
Button looked back and shouted. "I just remembered when we had that test at school it said I had a really beta-type personality! Run for your life!"
Rumble took wing and zipped after Button, the cy-dogs close on his heels. Down winding hallways and across plush velvet carpets they ran, heedless of anything in their way. They knocked over statues, locked doors, and tossed anything and everything that wasn't nailed down. The implacable cy-dogs cleanly jumped the statues, crashed through doors, and simply ignored whatever was thrown at them.
The two colts ducked into what looked like a massive dining room, the silverware and plates already set out on a long table the length of a normal living room. Rumble just flew over it. Button jumped up on it and started kicking plates, candelabras, and tea pots at the cy-dogs, which ignored every object that smashed into their impassive faces. They circled the table, barking madly.
"At least they can't get us if we climb!" said Rumble.
The dogs started chewing at the legs of the table, snapping them with their powerful teeth until the whole mess flopped to the ground. Button squealed as Rumble swooped in and pulled him into the air just before the dogs grabbed him.
"At least they can't get us if we fly!" said Rumble.
The cy-dogs observed their airborne targets for a few seconds.
Then they started shooting lasers out of their mouths.
"What the heck, man?!" Button screamed, flailing his hooves as the air was filled with crackling, neon-colored doom. "Stop giving them ideas!"
"Why does Diamond even have these things in her house?!" Rumble sobbed, juking and corkscrewing for all he was worth as the cydogs peppered the ceiling with laser bolts.
"If only there was some kind of small, insignificant thing we overlooked that would save us!" Button wailed.
And then it hit Rumble. "Wait! I still have the jar of Good Stuff we used to attack the butler! That'll foil their circuits for sure! Take it from my bag!"
Button yanked the jar from Rumble's saddlebag and twisted in his friend's hooves, cocking back his leg back for a throw. "Swing back around! We'll only get one shot at this." Button squinted one eye shut as he peered down at their targets. He had to land the jar and break it perfectly to get enough coverage. The air was filled with magical fire as Rumble literally screamed downwards in a steep divebomb.
"Almost there," muttered Button as his mind's eye pinpointed all three targets with glowing red crosshairs.
"Take the shot!" Rumble yelled in his ear.
"Allllmost there..."
"I can't hold it!"
When Button felt the searing heat of a near-miss, he swung his arm as hard as he could.
"It's away!"
Rumble peeled off as the jar of Good Stuff burst upon the eyes of the center dog, spraying the rest of them with the horrid substance inside.
"I hope you weren't programmed with a sense of smell, jerks!" Button shouted over his shoulder. He gasped in horror as he saw tiny windshield wipers pop out of the robot's eyelids and wipe away the gunk, which had left no visible mark whatsoever. "Uh. Okay," he told Rumble, "the good news? That was awesome. Bad news? They really weren't programmed with a sense of smell."
The center dog opened his mouth. Button saw its maw light up with neon purple, turned to shout up at Rumble, just in time for-
ZORCH.
"OWWWOWOWW!" Rumble cried out as his left wing flapped weakly once more, sputtered, then went limp with a loud cough. "They got me! Controls are shot! Aerodynamics busted! Brace for impact!"
The duo managed to aim for another hallway, screaming down the rest of the corridor before they crashed hard into the carpet, tumbling end over end. They hit another door so hard they smashed it open and flopped to a halt on top of each other when they bounced off the railing of a balcony overlooking Diamond Tiara's pool.
Shaking off their stupor at surviving such a crash, they came to just in time to realize they were trapped, and the cy-dogs were only moments away from turning the corner and spotting them.
Button grabbed Rumble by the shoulders. "Fly, dude. You gotta fly!"
Rumble responded with a weak whimper. "I, I can't. That must have been a numbing spell or something, I can't even feel my wing. You gotta go on without me!”
Button shook his head. “One, there’s a giant drop on that side and killer cyborg dogs on the other, so I can’t. Two, you’re like the brother I never had and I’m never abandoning you, so I won’t!”
Rumble looked up, his eyes shimmering with tears. “Do you really mean it? But… not in that order?”
Button shrugged. “Well, I’m pretty sure if I drank a glass of water I’d still be wetting my pants in sheer terror. So it’s a toss-up.”
Rumble sniffled. “That’s almost the nicest thing I’ve ever heard, in a weird backwards sort of way.” He glanced over the balcony. “But I think I’m getting another idea.”
A few moments later the cy-dogs charged around the corner and spotted their quarry shaking in their hoodies, huddled up under the balcony railing.
“This is a terrible idea,” said Button. “We’re gonna die.”
“Either we do this and we die, or we have to face Missus Mom for getting caught!” Rumble hissed.
“Oh, yeah. Easy choice,” Button had to agree.
The cy-dogs charged. Just as they were about to pile onto their prey, the colts jumped onto the railing and kicked off into thin air, screaming all the way and clutching each other for dear life. The rope they’d tied around each other stretched taut, and as the cy-dogs launched themselves after them, they flopped downwards underneath the snapping jaws. The cy-dogs were sent wailing to their doom, splashing into the pool and sinking like rocks.
Button and Rumble had no time to celebrate. The rope caught on the edge of the railing and swung them hard in an arc that got their faces very intimately acquainted with another window one floor down. Behind it was another cy-dog.
It said, “BARK BARK.”
With a loud sucking pop they came loose, flailing and screaming and somehow managing to swing their little hooves hard enough to overcome their own inertia and hurl themselves back up and around the balcony, this time becoming even more intimately familiar with a window one floor above. They found themselves peering into Diamond Tiara’s bedroom, which they first noticed was very, very pink. The next thing they noticed was a shocked and angry Diamond Tiara looking at them from under her covers.
“What!” she screeched. “All that commotion is being caused by you two losers?! Do you have any idea what time it is?” She huffed and threw off the bed covers, stomping over to the window. Since Button and Rumble’s faces were smushed flat against the glass, they couldn’t do anything but endure her berating. “I do not have the patience to deal with you numbskulls at school, and I most certainly do not have the patience to deal with you here.” She pointed up at them with a stubby little hoof. “Tell me what you’re doing here right now, or I’ll tell Daddy to call the police!”
“Mmfffmmmbblpppt,” said Button, leaving a spot of drool on the window.
Diamond sighed and opened her window, letting the colts tumble inside. Button managed to pop up dramatically and pointed his hoof right back at her.
“We’re here for justice! We’re here for all the little ponies who looked up at the stars and asked ‘Why? Why must the world be so unfair?’ We’re here to look ponies like you in the eye and say ‘No more!’ No more must we suffer under your tyrannical hoof! No more must we languish in the crevasses of our own sorrow! No more must we see living proof that girl ponies are super icky!”
“Ex-cuse me?” Diamond said, shoving her nose against Button’s. “You’re the one breaking into ponies’ houses! I knew you were a creep, but this is waaaay more than I thought even a tiny mind like yours was capable of!”
Button shoved back, trying to puff his chest out to its not-very-impressive maximum girth. “At least I’m not a stuck-up murglack with a tiara on her butt!”
Diamond rolled her eyes. “Oh, pulling out the made-up words again. Ever heard of a dictionary? You might wanna look that word up some time!”
“We wanted to steal your game,” Rumble said with a sad little sigh as he disentangled himself from the rope. “Vorpal Conflict 6. We were jealous that you bought it before us and were rubbing it in our faces. I don’t know what came over us. We were just sick of how you’re always showing off your money and we wanted to teach you a lesson. I’m sorry, Diamond. This all got out of hoof. We’ll go peacefully if you’ll let us, but your robot dogs chewed up the dining table.”
Diamond Tiara put her hoof over her heart. Her lower lip quivered and her eyes shone brightly in the moonlight. “Why, Rumble, I… I don’t know what to say. I’m touched. That’s so very mature of you to admit.” Her face warped into an evil grin as she pulled out a tape recorder. “I’ll be sure to use that in court!”
Rumble gasped. “You took advantage of my good conscience!”
“Ha!” Diamond barked, turning away and walking over to her toy chest. “A good conscience is just something ponies talk about when they know they can’t get out of trouble. You two are going down. It’s such a shame, too…” She sighed melodramatically, popping the chest open. “You’re going to pony jail for life without ever knowing the joys of your precious little video game!”
She reached into the chest.
“Ah HA!” she said, holding up an empty hoof.
Button and Rumble blinked.
“Oh,” said Diamond. “I forgot. It’s in chest number five. Wait right there, and don’t you dare spoil my moment to gloat.”
She went to her closet and rummaged around in silence for a minute, throwing out baseball bats, collectible action figures, and far too many stuffed toys than any little filly should own.
“Dude, she’s got us dead to rights! Missus Mom’s gonna kill us and then throw us in jail and then kill us again!” Rumble squeaked.
“Don’t worry,” said Button. “I thought she’d need a little convincing, which is why I brought these along.” He reached into his saddlebag and pulled out two little plastic cylinders.
“Flashlights?” asked Rumble.
“No! The Super Glo-Stick Laser Sword Pros we got for last Hearth’s Warming!”
“Whoa.” Rumble’s eyes widened. “You still have those? I thought Missus Mom confiscated them after you killed that pigeon!”
“You bet I do. One look at these and Diamond will be begging for mercy.” Button grinned and pulled out the power cords. “Just gotta find an outlet.”
Diamond came back out of her closet clutching the video game in her hoof. “All right, losers! Listen up. You’re gonna sit there and cry like babies while I wave the box around and talk about how rich I am. Then Daddy will come and get you arrested and thrown in pony jail—what the?!”
Button and Rumble posed under the dangerous red glow of the laser swords held tight in their forehooves. They hummed with dangerous power, crackling with energy that begged to be unleashed. Button lowered the tip of his until it pointed at Diamond, and then spoke in the best gravelly stallion voice he could manage, which was still really squeaky.
“Diamond Tiara. We aren’t leaving without that game. And the blackmail. Now hand over the goods… or prepare to be cut down to size."
“We’re not really gonna hit her with these, are we?” Rumble whispered. “I heard they can give a really nasty static shock and first-degree burns.”
“Nah, we’ll just wave ‘em around until she cries and gives up the game. Now CHARGE!”
Both colts let out a battle cry and ran right at Diamond Tiara, who was too shocked to move. They got about three steps before the cords popped out of the outlets, and were still running and screaming as their swords fizzled and died.
“YAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaahhhh-oooooh.” Button halted and glared at the impotent plastic cylinder in his hoof. “Huh! Over nine feet of super laser sword action my hoof.”
After a moment of silence, they heard a strange, ugly, frightening noise. Diamond Tiara was laughing.
“Heh heh heh.” Her mouth twisted back into that vicious grin. “Hehehehe! Ha ha ha ha! AHH HAHAHAHAHAAAA!” She went back to her closet, throwing her head back with manic laughter. “So you two little boys want to play with fire, huh? Well prepare to get burned!”
She spun around, holding the game in one hoof and a familiar plastic cylinder in the other. But this one was significantly longer, and near the tip was a skull and crossbones warning label.
“Oh no!” Button blanched. “How do you have one of those?”
“Those were all banned from production!” exclaimed Rumble, pointing at the crazed filly with a shaking hoof. “It can’t be one of those!”
Diamond snickered evilly. “Oh, it is.” She admired the jet-black polish and bright red buttons. “It’s amazing what daddies will get you when you’re vague and adorable enough. Behold! The Laser Sword Super Awesome Mega-Cutter 9000!”
She pushed one of the buttons, and a scimitar-shaped beam erupted from the hilt, drenching the entire room in a baleful red glow. Diamond grinned viciously over the edge of the humming blade, her teeth almost fang-like.
“And it’s battery operated.”
She raised the terrible weapon over her head, laughing with the manic exuberance of a pony who loved to strike fear in hearts of others. But she didn’t notice the very tip catch one of her many teddy bears in the eye.
FWOOMP went the teddy bear as it caught fire. It fell over and touched the edge of Diamond’s bed.
FWOOMP went the bed as it was engulfed in flames.
FWOOMP went the rest of the room.
It was then that all three foals started screaming.
Three hours later
Button’s Mom didn’t like being woken up at any hour she declared part of her ‘mom time.’ Most of the night was included in that. She especially didn’t like being woken up from a deep sleep and a wonderful dream, and especially not by a massive fireball on the edge of town.
What made her the most upset by far was the fact that she was woken up from a deep sleep and a wonderful dream by a giant fireball that her sweet, adorable, lovely little Button Mash had helped start along with his dear, cherubic, wonderful friend Rumble.
They’d been friends for even longer than she could remember, and she’d unofficially adopted Rumble into her maternal sphere of ponies she watched out for a long time ago. They were thick as thieves. Pure, cuddly, huggable grounded forever little balls of no court would convict me childish love.
And now they had burned down Diamond Tiara’s house.
She looked up at the still blazing wreck, putting a hoof on the bridge of her nose. All around her, fireponies and police ponies rushed back and forth, coordinated by Princess Twilight to douse the blaze. Diamond Tiara and her family sat nearby, looking nigh catatonic as they stared at their own roof cave in on itself with another gout of flame. They had more than enough money to build the house back exactly the way it was, of course, but that was not the point by far.
“Remember,” she hissed under her breath, struggling not to explode into a little fireball herself. “You love them. You love them both. So very, very, very much. You love them so much that you’re going to kill them. Really, actually kill them for real this time.”
The sound of flapping wings and labored breath brought her out of her murderous reverie.
“Miss M!” Thunderlane gasped as he landed behind her. “I came as soon as I could! Are they okay?! Where are they?”
“Oh,” Button’s Mom sighed, “down at the police station having a lovely chat with the chief of Ponyville police.”
“In jail?!” Thunderlane squawked, eyes boggling. “Uhh… isn’t that a little… extreme, Miss M?”
“Believe me, right now they’re safer in there,” said Button’s Mom. “Besides, I think a little scare is just what they need to learn never to do something this absurd again. Trust me, Thunderlane, a few hours in the stony lonesome and they’ll never need another Vorpal Conflict again.”
“No! No! It’s horrible! Stop it! NOOOOO!” Button wailed.
“GAME OVER,” intoned the digitized voice of Vorpal Conflict 6’s announcer as Button watched his character’s guts splatter across the screen from an angry minotaur’s warhammer.
Behind him, the Ponyville police chief and several of his deputies groaned in sympathy, crowding closer around the television in the police department’s break room.
“Oh, man! You were so close that time!” “Gotta learn those combos, bro!” “Can I get a turn?!”
Rumble chewed on another hoofful of popcorn. “Wow, I didn’t know going to jail was this much fun.”
“You’re telling me!” said Button, handing the controller to another excited deputy. “I’m so glad Mom suggested this punishment.”
“Now boys, your mother sent you here to learn a lesson,” said the police chief. “And what did we learn?”
Everypony in the room threw their hooves up and cheered.
“THIS IS THE BEST GAME EVER!”
Author's Note
I can't believe there's no character tag for Button Mash.
