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                          Starman                          
                        -by Lynaks-                        
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                         Prologue                          
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Prologue
My name is not important, but this is how my story begins.
After an eternity of sounds and noises, I finally seemed to return to the physical world. The first of my senses to return with any defined clarity, came with the realisation that all I could taste was chocolate, shortly followed by a confirming scent. Once I knew which way was down, I realised I was probably laying on some kind of soft carpet, or moss. Then, I heard the sound of rain hitting the side of my face, and felt the same there too.
It took me a lot longer to realise that my eyes were open, and that the backdrop of pink clouds, checked blue fields, and floating thatched cottages was something I'd eventually have to confront. I closed my eyes, and groaned. Every part of me ached, not from any kind of exertion, but that bones-deep lethargy that comes with midnight flushes of flue.
“Are we awake now, my little acolyte?” asked a voice vaguely above me, bleeding with a confusing blend of enthusiasm and age.
“Bthllrrr.” I responded, ill to my stomach and just trying to focus on breathing. I eventually rocked myself onto my front, and lifted up with just my arms. Carefully opening my eyes, I saw a puddle of muddy wa- no wait, liquid chocolate, which I'd been half-submerged in and groaned again as my mind did a half-hearted reel.
“Come now!” Said the voice, like a cat drowning in honey. “Is that any way to react to your god-in-the-flesh?”
I tried to push myself to something more dignified, but after my legs gave way almost immediately, plunging my lower half noisily into the thin lukewarm chocolate, I opted for a slow rock over onto my back. When a shadow passed my closed eyelids, and the rain stopped specking me, I opened one eye cautiously, preparing for another blow to my sense of normalcy.
A beige, goat-headed snake-thing with mismatched horns grinned down at me with yellow-red eyes and a crooked fang. So, you know, pretty much in the ballpark of my expectations.
I rolled over again, and was very violently sick.
Some of my darling readers are probably wondering why I wasn't applying any sense or logic to figuring out where I was, or why I was where I was. And the answer is that it just wasn't particularly high on my agenda. It was like waking up at four in the morning in a pool of your own feverish vomit, combined with the comedown of one hell of a bad acid trip. Only the vomit was chocolate-milkshake, and the comedown was some freaky arcane shit I'm not nearly qualified to explain.
Actually, it was much, much worse than any combination of drugs or fever. Being painfully kicked from one reality to another, with no sense of reference, or even any real memory of what caused it is a... jarring experience. I was confused, physically (and apparently magically) stressed, and as I later discovered, genuinely coming down from a malicious cocktail of aerosolised psychedelics sprayed right into my fucking face.
Assuming I didn't just die from the experience, of course.
Point is, it's not my aim here to be difficult. I don't want to make a long, confusing, and hard-to-read series of disjointed thoughts and emotions. I don't want readers to think I'm being obtuse just for the sake of being obtuse. Hell, I don't even know who my readers are, pony, human, or something else.
But nor is it my aim to write an enjoyable piece of light reading. I want to tell my readers precisely what happened, in what I think was about the right order, and while conveying just how mindbogglingly unprepared for the whole unpleasant experience I was.
I think what I'm really trying to say I please bear with me. Things are going to get a lot worse before they get any better.
A long while later, I'd finally managed to prop myself up against a tree. I mean, I thought it was a tree, but it felt more like a tower from a bouncy-castle, so I was mostly reclining in it. The entity was still talking about something probably very important, but... it's not that I wasn't listening, more that I couldn't even remember what he was saying as he was saying it. His conversation was merely guiding my long-lost trains of thought from whatever psyche-based wildlife they were harrying in my mind to other, no less strange tracks.
I think I was probably too preoccupied with holding myself together until whatever counted as normalcy returned. The external world -the one with chocolate-raining candyfloss clouds- was secondary to making sure the internal one -where everything hurt and I was strangely aware of my own breathing- was getting better. To that end, I was massaging my temples, reciting songs, and solving some basic maths until whatever was affecting me... stopped.
“And then I spend a few thousand years as a public garden ornament, but I mean really who can blame them after...”
On and on waffled my personal floating gremlin, joyfully reminding me that no matter how long I put it off, eventually I was going to have to confront the outside too. Which was a shame, because I was finally starting to calm down and realise that I was thinking logically, which meant I was starting to figure out what was normal and what wasn't.
But the grass was still a cheap blue carpet, the sky was still pink, and occasionally squirrels pogo-danced across the fields. And when I realised that, I started to feel sick again.
What’s the most pessimistic interpretation of events?
...I haven’t the foggiest.
"...But oh these ponies. They're so... predictable." He said with utter antipathy. "Everything has to be neat and ordered and on-time please yes thank-you madam.”
With sighing resignation, I decided to take some action in this pantomime my life had become. "What are you saying? Why are you telling me all this?"
"Oh, for my memoirs, of course! I'm putting you straight to good use. After all, it's not everyday I come across a fellow creature of chaos!”
“I'm not... what?” I asked, slipping down the inflatable shrubbery to the more solid and therefore real ground. “What the fuck did I do?”
“My my my, you are a little broken aren't you? The hop over does that to a... a person.” He gave a cackle of delight, “oh we're going to have SO much fun, you and I. Destruction, corruption, degeneration, regeneration...”
“Where am I?” I pleaded. “When am I, what am I doing here, I can't remember anything!”
“What? Oh, yes! I can help you with that!”
Then, without warning, and in a way I probably would have found quite jarring, he elbowed me, and I shattered. I can't describe the experience, and unless any of my audience are stained-glass windows I don't think anyone would be able to relate, but one minute I was whole and sitting and a little bit sick, and the next I was standing, surrounded by shards of myself, and feeling better for the experience.
Then, very quietly, I said to noone in particular, “I'm sorry, what?”
A wave of clarity washed through me just as everything I was thinking collapsed. Never-mind forgetting what brought me here, now I couldn't even remember my fucking name. But, I wasn't feeling out-of-touch, and I could regard everything with a sort of relaxed 'Yup. Right now, right here, this is how it is.'
“Oh, I'm sure you'll be able to pull yourself together in no time, you clever little human you. Now, I've got to see a princess about some rocks, ciao!” he replied, and then vanished. And I was okay with it, because that was how it was.
I looked down at the shards of broken me. “Alrighty then.” I said. I was myself a pale, monotone, and mostly transparent  ghost-like entity. I couldn't see or touch myself at all, and the only details I could make out at all were thick white outlines. It looked as though I'd been drawn and outlined in three-dimensional space, but I was still waiting to be painted in.
Which was interesting. I looked around.
I was sitting under a tree, in what looked to be some kind of town plaza. Thatched houses surrounded me, with pink doors and engraved hearts and an assortment of other saccharine peculiarities. A combination of what was probably once grass and cobblestone indicated paths and alleys, and infrequent trees and gaslight dotted the area. The trees were frequently rainbow-coloured, and the gaslights were surrounded by a dim, emanating shadow, as though sucking in surrounding light, but I still understood what they were trying to be.
In the centre of the plaza, dominatingly, stood a large, circular building with tall windows, concentric balconies, and a deep red roof. “Yes. That is probably helpful. Good.” I immediately concluded.
The process of getting there with a large pile of four-dimensional shards of person was about as difficult as you think, and I discovered two things: that I could only touch the shards; and that so long as I didn't think too hard about the first thing, I wouldn't slowly sink into the ground. So yeah, it took a good three round trips to complete.
I made my way to a set of double-doors that looked to be the entrance. Couldn't see in through the windows if I tried, of course, so I opted for politeness and knocked on the door. On my second attempt, I knocked with a shard, and actually produced sound. On the other side, I could faintly hear the sound of posh shoes on a wooden floor approach the doorway.
“Y-yes? Who is it?” asked an elderly, feminine voice.
“Ah, well, that's the buggerance.” I replied. “I'm trying to figure that bit out myself.”
There was the sound of locks, latches, bolts and an assortment other security measures being undone, and then the door opened slightly. Of course, I was looking at eye-level, so I saw nothing in the half a second it took to slam shut again.
Huh. Must've thought the shard of me was some sort of kitsch knife.
“Hello-o? Did... hi, help? Please?”
“Are you with... him?” hissed the voice from the other side.
“Oh, gosh I hope not. But maybe, it all depends. Who?”
“Please, just leave. We've got nothing for you.”
“Oh. Uh, I see.” I said, only slightly offended. “Well, good luck. Keep it together, and, uh, try not to let the inherent silliness of the situation get to you.”
So I left. Of course, I was then standing next to a good pile of me on the steps to an inhospitable building, so I decided to actually get down and give them a good look over. Little moving shards of body, as though a solid and frighteningly anatomically accurate porcelain figure had just been dropped from a great height. Blessedly, most had at least one side showing skin or black cloth from some sort of uniform. It suddenly struck me then just how completely lost I was, looking at myself without any recognition for my own clothing.
A few shards were pulsing, and I noticed that each time I shifted my weight, most contorted, so they were still mimicking my movements. And that meant that I could start filling my joints in fairly easily... if I only knew how I was supposed to get them all together.
After about ten minutes, I'd separated the shards into something resembling order. Which meant I'd spent ten minutes not really touching them or doing anything useful. Truth be told, I was hesitant. While I couldn't remember anything specific about my past before waking up, I did know that I clearly couldn't handle reality in one piece, and the thought of going back to confusion and insanity to the point of sickness wasn't one I cherished.
Still, I wasn't taking them anywhere soon, a huge pile like that. Sitting down on the stairs of the building, I wiggled a finger until I found the most energetic shard in the heap. A single white-gloved finger, with a sliver that looked to run through to the wrist. I gingerly picked it up, turned it over, and tried to fit it where it belonged...
“... Jesus Christ, where the fuck did they get guns?” I shouted, crouched behind the engine block of my car. Above and either side of me, bullets tore through the air, blasted through the thin metal doors, or crashed noisily through the bonnet. To the left, my off-duty partner lay prone beside the rear wheel, blood leaking from a deep gash in his lower leg. He gave me a pained look of incredulity.
“Where else?”
“Dover.” We both said, as another barrage of bullets collided with the other side of the car. Neither of us had even bothered pulling our only weapons, an ASP attached at the belt.
“How long 'till help?” He asked. I glanced at my watch.
“Uh, another three minutes.”
“Oh for fuck's sake. That's it, I'm getting a better look.”
I put my hand on the upper-side of the car preparing to run, jump, scream... I just prepared for everything to get worse as he poked his head up for a quick glance at our attacker/s during a short lull.
He came back down unharmed, but clearly shocked.
“What is it?” I asked, the most pessimistic part of my mind insisting that the lack of bullets could only mean they'd discovered an RPG in some crate or other, and were even now lowering its aim to our little car.
“It's Alex.”
“Oh. Wait, what?”
We instinctively both poked up to get a better look at the ‘abandoned’ dockside warehouse. My hand was shot. He was blinded by flying glass. Everything got worse.
“Oh, that's right.” I said, as though everything made sense now, which it didn't. I glanced at my now-complete right hand. The white felt glove barely masked the gauze and tape keeping my forefinger still while the complete sever slowly healed. A dull pain around the knuckle was the only present token of the tearing injury.
"Hmm?” Purred a familiar voice above and behind me.
“Oh, nothing.” I said, looking around. “Just remembered something.”
I was now sat on a small hill, under a tree again, but this time I could see the entire village vaguely below me. More two or three storey cottages, the large circular building in the centre... and a very clear view of what looked like a tree-house combination. Not a treehouse, a house that was built into a giant oak.
Dotted around the landscape, an assortment of diminutive horse-like critters of all colours walked, ran, flew, bubbled, flowed, and an assortment of other methods of locomotion.
“Where am I?” I asked.
“Oh, a very different world, I'm sorry to say.” answered the voice without even a hint of apology.
“Ah, right. I imagine I'll be quite cross about that when I'm done with this.” I said, gesturing down at my ghostly outline.
“Why would you ever say that?”
“Pretty sure I'm a detective constable with London. Not sure I'm going to appreciate a complete world shift.”
After a moment of silence, I turned to look at my companion. The winged serpent-goat-thing was looking at me with intense amusement.
“But...” he offered.
"But?”
“Despite being a good ol' cockney copper, you still felt that your allegiances were with..?”
“I... don't know?”
He huffed. “Oh, you'll figure it out eventually. Get to work, you're even more boring now than when you were before I fixed you.”
“Right. So you plucked me from my home and brought me here?”
The creature laughed. “Oh heavens no! Nonono, if I had that power, I'd be littering the land with your kind.”
“Fan of humans, are we?”
"I'm a fan of anything that can run through it's species' entire existence without getting bored of finding new ways of screwing itself over. It's my raison d’etre, after all.”
“Cool. French. So what did bring me here?”
“I found you wandering the chaosphere. Well, floating really.” He said. “Someone or something with considerable magical power trying very hard to send you very far away, without very much planning on the how or the where.”
“So you pulled me here?”
“Bingo.”
We spent a few seconds watching the village below, before he got bored and said something about seeing a pony about a labyrinth, and left with a small pop. And I was alone once more.
Then the hill turned to strawberry mousse.
A good few hours passed, and after a brief rain of chocolate-milk, I was able to gather the shards and begin reassembly of myself. I started remembering more general trivia about myself; books I’d read, my years at university, girlfriends, cars and so on.
I’d only found one more memory of my time as a policeman, and that was the midsummer and appropriately named ‘Passing Out Parade’. It was hot, horrible, and in London, which explained the difference in accent between myself and everyone else.
Once the piecing had become mechanical, I started focusing on more important thoughts. Like where I was. Clearly, I wasn’t in London anymore. Looking around, I wasn’t sure I was on Earth anymore. But that could be an effect of whatever force was periodically tormenting me with a chimera. I thought about what the chimera had been saying. Floating the chaosphere… what does that mean?
Well, clearly it means I was thrown into some sort of netherworld of pseudo existence. Said some part of me, resigned to my situation.
Oh, yes. Clearly. Said the larger part that was still confused. And how does one end up in this netherworld, hmm? Perhaps I tripped over a cheesewheel and fell out of the laws of physics, is that what you’re saying?
Probably. Do you have anything better?
I sighed, plugging my face with a shard that contained an eye. I remembered the assorted times I was made to wear incredibly slightly corrective spectacles.
Alright, so, pessimism. What’s the worst situation I could be in?
Oh, shit, right, uh… Well, we could be having a complete break from reality. Totally separated from the real world.
Ah. That’s not so-
I’m not finished. We’re sitting in a pool of blood, surrounded by the assorted viscera of one of the baddies we normally catch.
Right. So that’s-
And maybe even the victims’ too! I mean, we pretty much snapped and killed everyone nearby, and outside the police are negotiating for the release of the deceased, but we’re too out-of-it to register their voices as anything other than an amalgamation of animals. A chimera of chaos if you will!
Yes, I see-
Little do they realise we’ve killed them already, and the only hope left is to be shot before we can continue on our rampage!
…
Hello?
I’m concerned by my constant use of ‘we’. I’m not insane enough to have multiple personalities.
That’s what you think!
I paused from my task, considering that last errant thought while holding a piece of my memory made physical.
“Well shit.”
I plugged another shard into my throat…
"I mean, that’s a very interesting question.” Answered Alex, sitting in a large leather armchair that would’ve looked impressive if not for many unkind years in an attic.
“But if everything’s in twos between normal and supernatural and I don't know what to believe but if there’s two of everything and all things are two choices then it’s all yes or no and then I must be either dead or a god that’s what it all boils down to so what do you think?” I asked without taking a breath.
Alex leaned back in his chair. “I think," he said, stroking his beard, "this is the last time I give you acid.”
I looked around, my mind incapable of focusing on a single thought before it fizzled off in another direction. I was grabbing a chain of thought in the middle, and trying to see what lay at both ends at once. My world had collapsed to a single thought, devoid of context.
“So I’m dead?”
“Uhm, no.”
I was at the crux of everything, and nothing more important existed than the question of my own existence.
“Then I must be a God.”
“Eh, probably not in the way you’re thinking.”
Truth told, I wasn’t really listening to the answers. My mind was reeling from the realisation that my own personal experiences were all that truly existed. Which was evidently proof of one of two things: I was either being prepared for my ascent to godhood, or I was just now realising that I was already dead.
“So… so I’m dead then.”
“Look, why don’t we just listen to some more music..?”
Everything was an extension of that thought, flowering out from the single truth of existence into the physical world, always in twos, but always favouring one side over another. Wooden objects especially so. And I was only now experiencing it in reverse, so that all was collapsing back down the line to me, so that only two possibilities were left. Figuring out the answer to that final question would lead to either divine glory, or the cessation of existence.
I was then very violently sick.
When I snapped out of my little memory, it was night.
Oh, I get it now.
We were mad to begin with?
Shush. No, I mean I’m definitely not tripping or insane, I’m very certain that what’s happening now is real enough to be outside my brain’s capability for self-delusion.
Not… not even a little bit mad?
Shush! I mean... hopefully not...
I looked around with newfound clarity. I couldn’t see very far in the new moon, but I took sudden interest in what I could see. Walking along a dirt path a distance down where the hill used to be were six horse-like beings. Some of them were talking, and I was complete enough to be not quite okay with this.
Before I could shout anything, the one furthest back seemed to slip on something, and they all slid down towards the town in a single, almost comical heap. I looked back down to my half-finished body.
Well, at least I’m not the only one here.
No, we’ve got half a dozen talking horses to contend with our madness, what fun!
I said shush! I’m not mad!
And then the sun rose to midday in less than a second, and I began to weary of the ‘And suddenly!’s. Humming a tune, I jammed another few shard into my shoulder violently, all at once… And when no dramatic flashback occurred, sighed. I reached down for another piece, and saw it was the last one. The final piece of my chest.
The upper-left part, just over my heart.
There was a small, bloody hole where a watchchain should have been.
Oh, maybe that’s what the dead-god trip was all about.
I suddenly really, really didn’t want to finish.
I’m not sure how long I sat there, staring at the last shard of myself as it silently quivered and pulsed with every heartbeat I felt.
I can feel my heartbeat.
I looked down.
I was fine before I got shattered.
I looked down at the bullethole.
I’ll probably still be fine, and anyway, I still haven’t come up with any decent explanation for where I am.
I looked down at the bullethole in my hand.
The horses have stopped floating. Looks like the dragongoat won, I guess?
I looked down at the bullethole in my chest, that I was holding in my hand.
What do I stand to lose?
I shrugged, and finally pulled myself together…
Just in time for the speech.
Marching forward through the scattered tables towards the podium I went, cue-cards clutched tightly in my left hand. My right wasn’t nearly up for the task so soon after the surgery.
I’d been amazed they’d been able to reattach the finger at all, let alone with almost full sensation and muscle control. It ached, and I’d swear it was slightly wonky, but I’d been assured that time, and a little exercise, would have it back to normal in a matter of weeks. The sever had been both clean, and uncomplicated by shrapnel.
Things had not been so straightforward for Holburn. During the gunfight, what was left of a window was smashed, sending microfractured glass everywhere. Now, normally, the moment a window gets a nasty knock, the entire thing cracks over, so that instead of large shards of razor-sharp glass getting involved, there were countless, tiny, relatively blunt beads falling generally straight down or out instead of at the passengers (out being better than in, so reasoned the safety designers).
Countless, relatively and generally being the operative words. Since the window had been imperfectly broken already, what actually happened was when a bullet hit it with more force on a smaller pane than was ever expected in or out of lab conditions, the shatter didn’t get rid of all the edges, the glass flew outward from the car, and right into the eyes of my partner.
That would have been… well, not fine, but the damage from the explosion of glass would have been fixable. A few relatively minor scrapes across the surface. But Human Instinct doesn’t just say “Oh, you’ve got something in your eyes. I’ll just keep your hands away while you cry it out, or wait for a trained professional with surgical equipment deal with it.”
No, what that bitch Instinct made Holburn do, was rub his glass-laden eyes.
Of course, Alex had enough sense to leave after hearing our screams and figuring out who we actually were, and I didn’t know anything had happened until a week later, after my own surgery. I had (quite naturally, I feel) been reluctant to try to explain that the person who’d attacked us had been a close personal friend for many years, but H. was… less reserved. After being told about the fate of his eyes, and permanent blindness, he all but screamed the name of our attacker, and I had to quickly backpedal to feign confusion.
Sometime later, while we were still on leave, it was decided that a dinner would be held in honour of Holburn’s end-of-service promotion. We would both, naturally, be expected to make a speech about the dangers of associating for so long with the unstable and criminally-inclined. I’d been promoted to Detective Sergeant myself, almost solely for the privilege of attending the event.
And so here I was. All night I’d been going over my preapproved speech, littered with little buzzwords like civil compliance and subversive external influences. The perfect speech to tow the party line.
So of course, I was planning to go off the rails toward the end.
"Thank you for those kind words, Commander.” I said, undeterred by the size of the crowd now focused entirely on me. “And thank you all again for coming. It means a lot to David and I.” I inclined my head towards the table Holburn and I had been sitting. “I’d wave for him to stand for your attention but he uh…” I made a pronounced blink, eliciting a small, nervous laugh from the crowd, “and I uh…” I knocked my hand hard on the table by my bony wrist, making a loud, wooden knock that was picked up by the mic and carried through the auditorium. This got a bit more laughter, as the crowd eased into my darker humour slowly. Holburn, to his credit, stood up awkwardly, and made a sweeping, grinning bow to the hall. It was good to see him smiling after so many months of scowling.
That small deviation seemed to pass, and noone had rushed me off the podium. With the renewed confidence, I charged straight into my first cue, which I didn’t even bother reading. “But let us not forget why we are here.” I said, allowing a certain sombreness into my tone. “We aren’t just here for fine wine and fine food (though as a Welshman I must say the lamb shank is particularly divine). We’re here because someone was brazen enough to initiate gunfire against two men in the centre of London. That one of them was wearing uniform of the London Met seems to me irrelevant, a sentiment I’m sure many of you share. It was a gunfire that almost cost me, the uniformed officer, my hand, and it did cost my plainclothes partner his eyesight.
“And while that would normally be enough to be considered a tragedy, it made all the worse by the peculiarity of the attacker. We knew him, you see. Not in passing, not as an acquaintance or a colleague, but as an intimate friend for almost a decade. We knew him, but we didn’t… we didn’t expect him to…”
I paused. I had to, even for me, and for all I knew of Alex, the whole event was confusing beyond measure. I breathed, composed myself, drank from a small glass of red wine under the podium, and skipped ahead a sentence.
“Alex Stevenson shot at us. Despite everything we knew about him, he shot at us, and we almost died.” I paused. It sounded like a dramatic pause, but in truth, I was preparing my deviation, the one that would probably get me fired. “We don’t know why. But if I can guess at anything…”
I was silenced by a building-rocking, light-extinguishing explosion from the main entrance to the building. My first instinct was to scream ‘Alex!’. My second was to ignore the first, and compile a list of actual plausible terrorists. My third instinct looked at the name at the top of the list, and wanted to scream ‘Alex!’.
I settled for screaming quietly in my head. At the end of the day, anything Alex did was probably indirectly my fault anyway. I tapped the mic, checking it was off first, before I indulged myself in a small verbal whimper. The entire room erupted into chaos, lit dimly by the white streetlight streaming in through the giant windows lining one side of the wall.
Short screams and a stranger accompanying sound came from the double doors at the other end of the room, and the room fell silent again. The armed personnel either side drew their guns, and stood slightly away from the door to avoid crossfire.
Pessimism!
It’s Alex, and he’s had the building rigged with explosives for the past week now, waiting for this event.
Optimism!
It’s Alex, and he’s had the building rigged with a copious amount of psychedelics for the past week now, waiting for this event. Also, cake.
Uh, realism, something in the middle?
Terrorists are about to burst in through the doors and kill us all.
I nodded to myself, calming down. At some point, I’d picked up the wine glass again, and was now trying to inhale the contents, if my hand motions were anything to go by. An ordinary terrorist attack was the most plausible, yes, but…
The sounds stopped.
...my mind too quickly assumed Alex at both ends of the scale...
The doors opened just a crack.
...Something seemed just a little too-
Gunshots! No gunshots!
I opened my mouth to tell the officers by the doors to shut them immediately! when a length of orange pipe- no, one end of a very large hose was thrown into the room, and a wave of nausea and vomiting began to sweep the crowd towards me.
My heart-rate tripled, flooding my veins with adrenaline and my mind got to work.
Pipe. Poison.
Window. Air. Glass.
Podium: Too heavy
Wineglass: Weak[
Chair: Yes
I grabbed a chair to my right and swung it around towards the window to my side. I was the only person in position to hit any of the windows anyway, on an elevated stage near the podium, so my seething rage at noticing the unaffected members of the crowd scrabbling for the doors rather than doing anything USEFUL was probably unjustified. Once broken, I leaned over the jagged glass, took a deep breath, tried to calm the excitement that was making it hard for me to even clench my fists, and looked about outside. There was no way I was surviving a jump out the window onto the stone steps leading down to the basement level kitchens from my height, and a tall iron gating separated the fall below from the road across.
But damnitall, I wanted to know what was going on.
I took a few more deep breaths, and pulled myself back inside.
I looked around, and immediately saw the effects of severe intoxication. Some people moaned weakly, some giggled, most were lying on the floor in large puddles of sick. And then someone came in and shot me.
No, then… then Alex came in. He didn’t have a gun… but I got shot.
No, wait a moment… I was shot… Was I shot? Yes, because it missed Alex, and… and it hit a pipe…
No, nono, Alex had a gun, he was carrying the pipe… feeding a mask over his mouth. We… we talked… and then he looked at me very sadly.
… And  then I was shot...
… And I gasped, clutching my chest where the bullet had lodged itself. Jesus Christ it stang, now that I noticed it. I leaned forward into a puddle of strawberry mousse, trying to ignore the mind-numbing pain of a bullet very nearly in my lung. The gasp turned into a hiss, which then turned into a groan, and then again an outright scream. Each time I exhaled, the pain doubled again, like a sharp, ice-cold poker twisting into my ribs. Something tried to speak to me, but I was senseless to the world. My life, my heartblood was leaking out a hole in my chest, and I was going to die. I was going to die, and it was painful so painful and I didn’t want to die I don’t want to die my god it’s too painful…
And then the pain stopped.
“Well why didn’t you just say so?” Asked an irritatingly familiar voice somewhere vaguely behind and above me.
I reached slowly to my chest, wincing in preparation of a stinging pain, but couldn’t find a hole. Not just in me, but my clothes were undamaged, and under the clothes my thin bullet-resistant vest. I felt around my entire torso, nothing.
Standing up slowly, I checked myself over. Even the chocolate rain and the mousse seemed to have washed straight off. I was unharmed, undirtied, and uncreased. Physically, anyway.
“Oh.”
That’s it. I’m dead. I turned around, and looked the chimera in the eye. Hard not to, he was standing less than a foot away. And this is some sort of psychotic afterlife to punish people who think too hard about that sort of thing.
The thing looked expectant.
“Uhm, thanks?” I ventured.
“Oh, think nothing of it, my lad.” Said the entity in a voice like a thousand lazy bees. “I’d have done it sooner or later, probably. Maybe.”
“Right, yes. So uhm, now that I’m thinking a little more… laterally, can I just ask what the COMPLETE AND ACTUAL FUCK is going on?!”
The entity chuckled.
“Oh, that’s very simple. I rescued you from the Great Beyond!”
“So I am dead?”
“No, not quite.” He paused, thoughtfully. “I don’t know what you were doing there, but you were adrift and asleep in the realm I’ve always called the Chaosphere. My realm."
“That’s… not an answer.” I said, shaking my head. “I’m sorry, but I can’t accept that as an answer. I was dying on the floor of a banqueting hall, and now I’m here? Where’s Alex?”
“Oh, I haven’t the foggiest who that is. If it’s another human, I’m afraid you’re out of luck, you don’t get ‘em around here” It said, floating on an invisible hammock strung between nothing.
“...What?"
“None. You’re the only human in existence."
I hid my face in my hands, trying to get a grip on myself.
“I… That’s… Okay, I guess I can WHY ARE YOU MAGIC!” I screamed, very quickly finding more and more things to suffer over.
For his part, the being just chuckled to himself. “It’s not nanomachines.” He said. “You were about to ask, and it’s not.”
For my part, I was about to cry.
“Look,” it eventually said, “we may have got off on the wrong paw here.” It jutted forward a bright orange lion’s paw. “Discord. Spirit of Chaos and Disharmony."
I looked up at him. He looked sincere enough, but… damnitall if I wasn’t feeling miserable about the whole situation.
What do I have to lose?
The rest of our sanity, any sense of normalcy, our lives.
You still need to shush until you stop calling me ‘We’.
I stood up, and felt a slight tickle in the back of my mind. Deep breath, compose, just like any other interview.
Sure, some details were different, but it was still an interview, albeit an unorthodox one.
Or is it a full-blown interrogation?
“Hah!” Said Discord. “I’ve never been interrogated before!”
“Get out of my head.” I demanded, and the tickling stopped. “I wasn’t talking about you, I was talking about my new measure of reality.”
“Oh, that’s much better! So, what’s your name then?”
“I’m… actually, if I’m in a world with magic now, I’d rather you didn’t know.”
It grinned, flashing a range of sharp, disordered teeth. “Now you’re getting it! Keep your true name hidden from the fey, eh?” it said, before criticising the finer points of my personal life, and offering a few housing suggestions outside Greater London.
We walked -well, I was walking, Discord floated- and talked around some sort of palace garden, while I slowly tuned out the 'disorganised silliness' and LOLRANDUM motes seeding the scenery. Statues of the ‘pony’ race were scattered around, some stone, some frozen in time by some power of the minor deity in my company. We talked about chaos, about humanity, and about equineity. We also discussed his stone imprisonment.
“So you’ve got godlike power, and you can predict ponies to near omniscient accuracy, why stay stone? Or get caught in the first place?”
Discord tugged his beard in thought. “Well, mostly because I’ve got other realms to rule, and these ponies only ever get anything done when they’re sure I’m silent. But mostly, I’ve been waiting for the right time to return. Equestria needs enough ponies who can break the mould of mindless harmony for me to truly enjoy myself, certain individuals with a sense of individuality and identity beyond being her subjects. And I need to emerge now, briefly, so that in… oh… about a year or so, Fluttershy will try to befriend me. Haven’t had a friend in awhile, and I think I could do with a little relaxation from the norm.” As if to emphasise this, he stretched back so far his head almost hit the floor, and a loud series of cracks echoed around the clearing.
Out of the corner of my eye, as if reacting to the sound, I saw a flash of something red. Turning, I saw nothing, and decided I had better questions to ask anyway. “I never pegged you for a predestinationist. Isn’t that a little unchaotic? Knowing the outcomes of every action?”
“Oh, sometimes, yes. But I just can’t help it; the only beings on the planet I cannot predict, right now, are you and I.”
“Why me?”
“Oh, something in the blood, probably." He said, turning a nearby window into peanut-brittle with a snap of his talons.
My mind shutdown briefly as I considered what could possibly be in my blood to make me invisible to a god, when something sharp hit my shoulder. I’m ashamed to admit I screamed.
A phoenix screamed back at me.
“Oh, and I can’t predict that, either, but for entirely different reasons.”
Like what? Asked a curious little part of me, a part that was drowned out by “THERE’S A PHOENIX ON ME!”
“Yes, Celestia’s. Oh, what was it called… filly something… Ah, Philadelphia.”
I didn’t calm down. Flames were starting to spring from where its talons dug into my evening-wear, and a nearby water fountain had just begun the process of bending towards me. “There’s a PHOENIX on my SHOULDER.”
“Mmm, yes. It seems to like you, dispicable thing. No taste whatsoever. Fortunately, it doesn’t really do anything important enough to throw off my predictions. Just a boring little furnace of perpetual order.” The phoenix hopped over to my shoulder closest to Discord, deftly dodging a blast of lemon-scented water, and squawked loudly at him. “No I am not going to tell him! He’ll have to figure it out by himself.” Another squawk. “Luna, probably, I don’t know!”
“Uhm, what?” I asked, trying to avoid the water fountain.
“Shush mortal, the legends are talking. Yes, I know it’s probably incredibly dangerous, and might bring about the end of the universe as we know it, and I know there’s probably a safer way of doing things, but I like my way better. It’s more fun. And it’ll probably make for a very interesting serial novelisation.”
“Uhm, what?”
“You really should stop saying that, you know. You might get stuck.”
I stopped paying attention around then because Discord started speaking to the bird in Diminutive Horse, and looked around. We’d just left the gardens, and we were walking down a long corridor. Behind me, I noticed, parts of the castle were turning into confectionary, banners and ribbon becoming custard waterfalls and streamers. Which explained the relative normalcy of the walk as I’d been seeing it.
We approached a set of doors leading to what was recognisably a throneroom, with a large, low, well-cushioned throne at the end, occupied by a pony princess, and Discord stopped talking to Philadelphia.
I froze, only noticing after a few beats that she was still, like everyone else I’d seen so far. The white entity radiated regality and order, and a slight warmth. She was easily the size of a regular horse, but felt larger than anything I’d ever seen. The phoenix flew off to the throne.
“Jesus Christ.” I said.
"No, that would be Luna. Celestia here fancies herself as more of a Noah. With something of Judas mixed in, trigger personal tragedies and all.”
“What is she?”
Discord huffed. “A pain in my posterior. Otherwise known as an alicorn.”
“No, I mean, what is she? I’ve never… seen anyone or anything like her.”
I noticed he wasn’t answering, and turned  to see him looking at me with a curious smile. “What?”
"Oh, nothing. I’ve just forgotten… what sort of effect gods can have on mortals.”
“I… no offence, but aren’t you supposed to be a god?”
“Yes, but I’m split between about three continents right now, this isn’t the whole of me, so to speak.”
“Oh. So she’s a god?”
“Eeeeech maybe? She certainly likes to think so, though she does like to… present herself as more important than she is. Celestia controls the sun, you know?”
“I…” I turned back to the princess. “I’d ordinarily question that assertion, but… right now…”
“Hmm. I’ll have to fix that later. Can’t have you going native just because you got caught up in her glamour.”
We stood there awhile longer before the phoenix, almost forgotten, bit my ear and snapped me out of my awe.
“Ow. So what’re we doing here?”
“Well, I’m waiting for you to get over your little entrancement. I need you to write a few things down.” he said, pointing over to a small desk in the corner of the throneroom, covered in parchment and an inkwell.
“Oh cool. Like what.”
“Everything.”
“Ah, right. Everything” I sniffed. “That could take awhile.”
He chukled. “Everything since you came here."
“Ah, that makes sense.” I nodded. Then the bird bit my ear again. “Actually, no, that makes no sense at all. Why would I do that?”
“Because I’m about to do some powerful magicks.” he said, and I could almost hear the addition of a ‘k’. “And I need some link to your mind. For reasons.”
“Oh, well if it’s for reasons…”[
I looked around again. Frozen guards, frozen waterfall, frozen godlike princess.
"I suppose we have time.” I said, scritching the bird under its beak
I was about halfway through the second scroll.
"So what’s going to happen when I’m done with this?”
Discord, who’d been suspended upside-down in a jar of jam while I learned how to quill, poked a small hole in the side and pushed his snout through. “I’m going to send you to the past.”
“Cool.”
I was starting on the third scroll.
“How?”
“Magic."
“...Fair enough.”
I was almost done, five scrolls in all, finishing this one, when…
“Oh, and I think I’ll wipe your memories.”
And then I spilt ink over half the page.
"I beg your pardon?” I seethed back at him.
“You have it. Believe me when I say I have a reason.”
“No! No I don’t believe you to have reason. By your own admission, you’re unreliable!”
Discord groaned and slid out through the coin-sized hole, which was a lot more horrifying to witness than I promise you can imagine. That he did it backwards didn’t help.
“I don’t want you messing with causality unnecessarily, but I need you to go back and change enough to be interesting. Why half-ass it when I can just send you back to mess with Twilight’s life from the very beginning?”
“Because… I mean… It’ll fuck with me all over again!”
He shrugged. “Not really. You’ll still have recovered already, even if you don’t remember it happening. The patterns of being… blech… used to this world are there in your brain, they just need a little jolt to reactivate. And I really can’t have you spoiling anything with foreknowledge.”
I’m writing this now as a way of digesting the issue. I should probably be more annoyed, raise a bit more of a fuss about the whole thing. But… honestly? I’m too tired. I’ve been scribbling on handmade parchment with a feather for more hours than I care to count, and I’ve taken a beating to more than just my mind. Though the pain’s gone, I can still feel a small disc of metal between my ribs, stopped on its path to my heart only by a thin layer of hyperplastic or kevlar or whatever my suit vest’s made of. So I think I’m just going to let it slide.
It’s probably not worth debating with a deity that feeds on arguments.
Apparently, he’s arranged that I’ll pop into existence a few weeks before the ‘Summer Sun Celebration’, which he assures me is enough time to get used to the new way things are right before shit turns sour.
He also promises that both the process of wiping the contents of the scrolls from my mind and him being here completely whole would be such wondrous magic to behold that I would scarcely be able to pen it justice. If only if only I could somehow remember so as to write it all down.
Ah well. Life’s full of little disappointments.