The last question was asked in Flutterhy's cottage in the 1112 year of Celestia's reign, and it happened this way.
"Would you maybe like to, err... have sex?"
Discord scoffed at this, flicking his teacup to the side and briefly losing a drop of tea before it inexplicably sprang back into his cup. "My dear, why would I lower myself to such a carnal, primal pleasure? I've no more need for it than I have for, say, Life Alert or taxes."
"I mean, I would... enjoy it..."
And just like that he sealed his fate.
At first, it had been mildly enjoyable. She had kept a surprising pace with him, and he had only used a fraction of his ability; nonetheless, as she continued admirably, despite his respect for her, he found himself admitting it was best not to let her get a big head, and thus he had upped the ante.
And to a horror that chilled him to his very bones, she matched him still.
He only kept pushing further, each time sure she could not follow him, but no matter how sudden, how jarring, or how many arms he grew to use at once, she continuously tailed an iota of force behind him, sweating over him and panicking further; Like a little nash rambler in his rearview mirror, he just couldn't shake her.
Now he was moving fast, very fast, and quickly approaching climax, and yet she still hung on, no further than he was. And it was at this moment he realized the chance of losing existed, something he had never considered until it was far, far too late.
Discord was shaking now, sweating even harder, and in his desperation to save face, he thought one single word.
No.
Discord lifted his hand weakly, and summoning a burst of energy from somewhere he didn't know existed, snapped his fingers.
Time froze. Fluttershy remained suspended in the air, mouth half open, eyes scrunched shut, and in the next second Discord slid out from under her, panting in exertion and calming himself.
No, this could not be. This would not be.
In the absence of anything else to occupy his time and help him think, he conjured forth a milkshake and began sipping it, watching the yellow form trapped several inches above the bed with idle curiosity.
Discord was torn. On one hand, he could do anything- If he wanted, no more than a thought would win him this game of theirs. But that wasn't enough; he would have lied to her, and he would have to look her in the eye every day for the next 66 years of her life and know that he lied to her. But on the other hand, he couldn't lose- he had never lost in this art, this game of will. He could take a being from beyond the realms of reality besting him, he could even take Celestia besting him- hmm, now there was a pleasant thought- but he refused to take even the possibility that a mortal of impermanent blood and bone may be able to best him in what he did best. No, he had thrown his ego around, and he could not in good conscience allow either of these options to persist.
There were no options left. So naturally, he made one.
In his infinite might limited only by the reach of entropy, the most all reaching force of existence, he tapped the harmonic balance between planes, and in a pair of conjointed efforts from the combined strength of the Something and the Nothing, he willed into life a world; guided his thumb along the stream of its immortal fourth dimension, and at the moment he resided in, made a change with the precision of a quantum surgeon, flipping a single, microscopic switch from a 1 to a 0. And immediately, he filled the void of that world, leaving his old frozen reality behind to scribble his existence into every moment from the world's beginning to end, and finally zeroed into one crucial moment-
Fluttershy came. Discord did not.
He sighed exageratedly as Fluttershy fell beside him, panting. "Well, you win some, you lose some."
But the future refused to change.
He felt it in his bones, in the corporeal form he adopted and deeper, into his constant awareness of all the universe's decay; a feeling stronger than words, screaming at him every moment as he laughed and played and chatted with Fluttershy and her friends, the message you don't belong in this timeline. It continued for another two weeks, until it suddenly seemed to fall silent; bating its breath, at the exact moment Fluttershy asked once more if they could fuck.
Discord obliged, of course.
Fluttershy nearly defeated him, of course.
The process repeated, of course.
He was twenty timelines deep now, and the feeling shook him to his very core. He had trouble maintaining his form, and the ponies around him noticed; in one timeline, he had even been taken to Celestia for an attempt at treatment, which delayed Fluttershy's advances by a good month. But the inevitable always came; Fluttershy would ask innocently, Discord would take up the challenge, convinced, desperate to win just once, and he would lose, every time pausing the timeline and creating a new one where he won. It couldn't go on. Something had to give.
A mind could not remain in this state, fractured between twenty different timelines, nineteen fragments of his soul inert and frozen in worlds that had been permanently put on hiatus.
"...Discord?" His left eye snapped to attention, zeroing in on his partner like a laserbeam, and the teacup he had been lifting froze so suddenly that a drop levitated above the surface for a second.
"I know it's been a while, and you seem to be... err... distracted, lately..."
His cup felt very fragile. The couch he sat on felt very fragile. His own partner felt very fragile.
"But I was just wondering, I've been feeling... um... A little pent up lately..."
Something sparked inside him. He couldn't do this again. He wasn't strong enough; not physically strong enough to fracture his soul into a 21st timeline, and not emotionally strong enough to admit what he knew to be true, that in the field of Coitus, Fluttershy could beat a god.
"So, would you maybe like to..."
He began to vibrate, very quickly, drilling a small hole into his cushion seat.
"...Err...
Have sex?"
Discord fled backwards, to long, long before anybody had dreamed of a Fluttershy, or even a pony. He fled backwards at speeds Tachyons had nightmares of, and when he finally stopped to rest in the primordial soup before life, he found he could think clearly. Every timeline existed in a neat order, one on top of another, which meant he had thousands of years before other versions of him would begin freezing their worlds in place and splitting their minds, before he would be forced into carnal combat.
With ten thousand hands, he grabbed the timestream, and pulled. Like an iron bar, time began to bend, and finally gave as he wrenched it in another direction, the primordial soup around him adopting entirely new genetics.
He needed another reality, one without the fret of sex on his mind. He would sleep, until it was once again time to resume the immortal game; and as he slept, he would dream of a more permanent solution.
Discord screamed as time rewrote itself, and his physical form was torn asunder. Seven infinite sets of strings screamed with him.
"Hey, take a look at this for a second."
Fluttershy was just putting on her sweater when Twilight called her over.
"I really should be going home. It's late, and we've got a lot to do tomorrow."
"I know, but this will be worth it. I promise."
QUANAC was the end result of millions of years of research in magic and technology, aided by a team Fluttershy and Twilight sat at the forefront of. The computer that sat before Twilight, and now Fluttershy as she begrudgingly approached and hung up her coat again, was the most powerful computer ponykind would ever create, from now until the end of their days. With the particles contained inside it, Fluttershy had her doubts it could even be recreated. Millions of years from now, it could still be the only one of its kind, and would still work just as well as it did today; quantifiable, for what it was worth, infinite power contained in a single finite space. It was the wet dream of a scientist.
The screen showed nothing, and at Fluttershy's confused glance, Twilight clarified. "I'm zooming out. Just out of curiosity, I pulled up a simulation of our planet, ran it from the beginning of time to now in about a second, and I've been zooming out for a good twenty minutes now."
"This is... nice, I suppose, but why are you showing me this?"
"I didn't expect to find anything, obviously. It was just to kill time. But..."
"We know the multiverse exists. It's practically the key to making this work. What else could there be to see?" Fluttershy mused.
"Well... nothing to see." Twilight began slowly. But when I asked for an audio simulation of what space sounded like at this distance..."
At a hoof wave, audio turned on; a low hum, of course, the distant noises of all the planets and stars in every known universe... But then, just below it, a rasp, barely audible.
"Turn it up." Fluttershy commanded. "Um, if you would, please."
The hum was deafening now, and Twilight visibly shuddered, but still they had to focus to hear the voice, buried deep under the auditory fuzz, shifting in and out of lucidity...
Oh
Oh
Each repetition broken by a sound that was unmistakably a breath; the breath of a living creature, at a scale that only a computer could comprehend. Something on the outskirts of space and time, larger than the entire multiverse... and alive.
Almost unthinkingly, Fluttershy whispered, "What... is it?"
The audio shut off.
The computer screen displayed a single message.
Transmission unknown
Millions of years later, Fluttershy, perhaps the last living soul in the galaxy, would settle upon what remained of the planet Earth.
It had been a long time since Ponykind thrived. The universe had marched on, and the power of their savior, the computer QUANAC, had allowed them to finally breach the stars and begin settling distant planets. In the end, QUANAC's original form had been abandoned; every citizen of the universe held QUANAC's voice, which it broadcasted to their minds from its home on earth, but none had given the planet very much thought.
Until Fluttershy. In a home as poor as her's, she had turned to science to fill her time, and become fascinated with the multiverse's questions. And one question, raised by the very descendant she had been archaically named after, the same descendant who had helped bring them into the post-earth age they now knew and had become immortalized in history, was the question she sought from QUANAC's original form.
Deep in the desert, amidst the remains of what was once a civilization, QUANAC's form sat in the blown out shell of a highrise building lost to time and the sands. And here, standing before it, Fluttershy saw the program that had been running on it for millions of years.
A simulation of the multiverse, left zooming out from the day of QUANAC's birth. With a flick of a hoof, Fluttershy turned audio on, and asked the last question Earth had to offer;
"What is it?"
And QUANAC replied simply, in the answer its makers had waited millenia for, in a cry out across the desolate land for the ears of many, meeting only the ears of one;
OH GOD OH FUCK IM GONNA CUM AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
In the year 25252525252525252525252525252525, Ponykind was still alive.
The Great Black Hole had become a tumor on the Multiverse, swallowing up all that remained of existence. Only the planets at the very edges of the universe remained, and on one of them, a planet that had long since been forgotten but had once been called Earth, Fluttershy screamed.
She was Ponykind's last hope; someone had to survive. Their progress would not be for naught. A part of her knew her species could never have lived forever, but she refused. Her two namesakes had both forever changed how ponykind thought of life. She would do the same, one last time.
And so, she had come to the last bastion of hope; the computer QUANAC, on a planet that had been torn from its galaxy and now hurtled towards the black hole along with the rest of the multiverse. On its face, Fluttershy screamed as her mind merged with the computer QUANAC, and in a second between promising herself it was worth it and her planet's final descent into the black hole, she felt her consciousness leave her body just before it was spaghettified completely.
She was beyond the multiverse now. Even as it died around her, she continued to live on a quantum scale; but even that was not enough. Fluttershy panicked as she felt herself vanishing in a way she didn't even know was possible, as even death itself died.
There was no hope for her left. She had to make her species' last great sendoff to the cradle that raised them.
So, in her quantum state that stretched across infinity, she coalesced matter into a single form, a hoof to challenge Celestia's, and reached for the stars even as they blinked out in their final stages of life. The stars stared back, and they were scared.
Her hoof came forward, and the multiverse exploded in an ejaculation of matter and energy.
It was like a giant reset switch, and before Discord could comprehend what had happened, he was whole again, in the only timeline that existed, in a multiverse peacefully expanding, on an alive and healthy planet Earth, and sitting below Fluttershy on her couch.
"Phew! That was fun!" Fluttershy breathed.
Discord screamed.
Author's Note
How many times, across all of my written works, do you think i've typed the words 'reality', 'existence', and 'multiverse'?
