99 bottles of Chaos on the Wall
Hold my notes, watch this
“I call it the ‘Omnitrot.’”
Facehoof. “You are terrible at making up names, One.”
“I know!” One replied. “It was one of the best qualities we got from Dad.” One then turned to hoof-bump his brother, aptly named ‘Two.’
His cousin, Gem, a blue furred orange maned unicorn, sighed. “If you three weren’t actually competent, I would be drunk right now.” She looked forlornly at the bar, hissing at the disappointment of not being plastered out of her skull, and looked back at the triplets.
One was a brown unicorn, with a white mane. Two, his younger brother, was a pale blue pegasus with a short cut, dark purple mane. The youngest was not named Three. Instead, he was named Four, and grass green, and a bald head. His tail was dark red, if it helps.
Gem took a sip of her non-alcoholic cider and stared blankly at them.
“Hey,” One said. “It fits. ‘If one were to walk a league in another’s horseshoes.’ That’s the whole purpose of this project.”
Four nodded. “If this works, we might be able to help everypony understand each other better.”
“Oooo, don’t forget the griffons, minotaurs, thestrals, etc.” Two chimed in.
“Well, with the blizzard going on as it is, there’s nothing better for me to do for the next week,” Gem replied unhappily. “I’ll help proofread you guys’ stuff. Are the notes here?”
The triplets stood up happily. She agreed! “Back in our tower!” One said. If this works, they’ll be able to catch allll the chicks!
A few hours later, after the blizzard sorta kinda died down, the group went into the tower in which One, Two, and Four had set up a rune testing laboratory.
After the triplets proved to Gem that they weren’t full of shit, she reluctantly agreed to proofread their work, and help with their development whenever the local school wasn’t busy.
It took them a few months, and multiple iterations before their first breakthrough.
Two opened the door for Gem, the pegasus smiling eagerly. “Come in, come in! We got something to show you!”
Gem raised an eyebrow as she lifted her bags and coak off and set them in a pile. “Really? Gone for two weeks and already you three have progress? Did you manage to stop the thing from exploding?”
Two paused in thought. “That too. Now come on!”
Two led his cousin to the ‘testing room’, where his other two brothers were cleaning away the prototype rune circle.
Gem gave the set up a scrutining eye. “So, what is it?”
Four looked up, smiling. “Just watch.”
One levitated over a coat and a face shield while Four moved an orange and a banana onto the rune circle. Four smiled and said, “Annnnd go.” He placed his hooves on the edge of the circle, channeling magic and lighting up the inside of the tower with an eerie green.
The lines of the rune lit up with power, causing the orange and banana in their respective magic circles to jitter and hop. A sort of heat haze came up between them, warping their appearance and making it appear as if they were stretching towards each other.
It was quickly made clear that it was a mere illusion when bits and particles started flaking off the fruits, suffering a massive amount of local spaghettification and merging.
A flash of light later, the only thing that remained was orange and yellow striped fruit. Gem squinted “I thought you guys were trying to do something with body switching.”
“Well, yeah, but steps, you know,” Two said. “First we need to make sure we can even combine parts and such. Next step is to separate them.” Behind him, the fused fruit leaked juice.
Gem leaned around him. “You might want to work on that. That doesn’t seem safe.”
Said fruit proceeded to split apart and spill its pureed innards everywhere.
“Definitely not safe.”
Two checked a sand timer. “Thirty seconds! That’s the best yet! And no high speed separation,”
Gem groaned. “Give me those notes.”
For the next few days, Gem helped proofread the mess the triplets wrote down into a something that was actually usable as a reference book, then set them on the troubleshooting process so they could keep working on her modifications while she was away.
Later, when she had a bit of time to visit over the weekend, she found a note nailed to the door. Worrying about eviction notices, she galloped over and ripped the note off.
“Dear Gem,
We got a prototype working, and are traveling around the place to see if there’s any one out there interested in helping development. Can’t have shoes of others without any shoes to actually wear. See you at the end of the month.
Love,
--One, Two, Four.”
“Why couldn’t he be named ‘Three’?” Gem groaned.
Gem ended up sweeping the inside of the tower every week while she waited for her cousins’ return. Fortunately for her sanity, they came in while she was still inside the tower, sipping tricks and flipping over some of the papers left behind.
She looked at the new arrivals, and sighed. “Frankly, I’m not even surprised anymore,” returning to a newspaper as the griffon, changeling, alligator, and goat walked in. “What did you three do this time?”
“We made friends!” One shouted cheerfully, tossing a small cloud of colorful paper.
Two pointed at them with his wing. “Beak is the griffon, Nine Thousand and Three is the Changeling, Toothy is the ‘gator, and Frog is the goat.”
Gem stared blankly at them for a few seconds, then slowly rotated her head to stare at One. “Are you sure these aren’t your relatives?”
“I don’t think so, why?”
Gem reached under a table and pulled out a glass bottle. “I’m not sober enough for this.” She conjured a magic needle and fed alcohol straight into her bloodstream. Her eyes dilated for a moment, and she took a deep breath. “Ok. I’m not going to remember the next few hours. Let’s get started.”
Three months later, and a copious amount of explosions (and alcohol scented air) the dubious team of scientists finished what should be the near final iteration of the Omnitrot. Gem was sleeping off her twenty-milliliter alcohol injection-induced hangover, and probably wouldn’t be awake for some time, but the team also wanted to surprise her with the results.
They moved to their respective corners, and activated the spell. Unbeknownst to them, Gem twitched in her sleep, rolling a bottle of beer to the edge of the rafters. The bottle bumped against the railing, spun, and fell, bouncing off the head of Toothy. The spilled beer splashed across the runes, sparking and short circuiting.
There was another alcohol scented explosion.
A mismatched creature lay in the center of the circle, twitching and vomiting slightly like the world’s worst hangover. Their was a tiny, but extremely deep hole underneath its body, which was covered in frost.
It drunkenly floated out the window and began flirting with a cloud.
Gem hissed at the pain in her lower torso, but still couldn’t find the effort to wake up. There was also an insufferable singing right beside her. “Shut up, Two,” she muttered sleepily, her hoof waving around. She found a long, feathered object, and flung it vaguely in the music’s direction.
There was an indignant squawk.
“What?/”Fbbbbtt?”
Gem looked down through a fuzzy haze. It appeared that her lower torso was a few feet away from her, and charred to a dark blue that seemed almost black, along with the rest of that part of the rafters.
She looked off to the side, and saw a dazed cockatrice at the base of a giant, chimeric statue.
“What?”
She looked outside the half collapsed tower, seeing the cheering crowd. There was a disgusting squelching noise as her severed torsos regenerated, creating a white and dark blue clone.
A wave of dizziness swept over the both of them. “We ... we are drunk enough for this.” The pair smiled crookedly and laughed.
In the distance, Nine, the triplet’s father, looked out the family house’s window with a telescope.
“Sorry, me,” he whispered, “but I need to preserve my existence.” He retreated into the house’s basement, pulling open a trapdoor. He reached over his back, and pulled open a zipper, letting a mismatched pair of wings spring out.
Several days later, a tiny green claw slowly pulled its way out of the wreckage of the tower.
Purple eyes blinked off sync, an empty bottle clenched between his toothless jaw. It spat it out, and shuffled painfully to the miraculously intact wine cabinet, and started chugging them by the bottle.
Six bottles later, he tossed the empty bottles to the side, and clenched his head, Too sober, too Sober, TOO SOBER!
His brain screeched to a halt, and he slowly relaxed. He sat on the floor, and stared blankly into the rising sun.
