Twilight and Discord sat together at a table at an outdoor restaurant, the former sitting politely with all four hooves where they should be, and the latter with most of his body coiled like a snake, allowing his neck and head to stick out from the middle.
They had been asked by Fluttershy to spend some time together, as she had felt that both of them had negativity between them. It took some convincing on her part, but the polar opposites were now sitting face to face, Twilight sporting an annoyed expression, and Discord wearing a smug grin and periodically sticking his tongue out at Twilight.
Twilight sighed and rolled her eyes, picking up one of the miniature daffodil sandwiches she had ordered and bringing it up to her mouth, resolving to try her best to have a nice lunch with the spirit of chaos. Not a straightforward goal, but she and Discord were friends; she figured nothing too catastrophic would happen.
“There’s a bomb under the table.” Discord said, as neutral in energy as if he was acknowledging the existence of a flower in a field.
Twilight looked up and dropped the sandwich she was holding in her magic, staring a hole through Discord’s face. “Um, pardon me?”
Discord scoffed. “It’s not that complicated, Twilight.” He pulled a little more of his upper torso out from his coil. “There is a bomb. Under the table. You can check for yourself if you don’t believe me.” He gestured loosely with his talon toward the underside of the table, his paw resting against his cheek in a fist.
Twilight hesitantly poked her head under the table, and sure enough, she was met with an overly elaborate-looking explosive device, complete with all the blinky lights and buttons you could ever want secured to the underside. She jumped in surprise, loudly hitting her head against the underside of the table.
“Hahahahaha!” Discord slammed his fist against the table in his fit of hysterics. “Oh, thank you ever so much, Twilight, I needed a good laugh!” He wiped a tear from his eye and started to compose himself, slowly but surely.
Twilight sputtered, struggling to sit back upright in her chair and collect herself enough to say something. “Discord! Why is there a bomb under this table!?”
Discord idly stroked his beard with his talon and maintained eye contact with Twilight. “Twilight, you should know by now not to ask me why I do things. The answer is and always will be ‘why not?’” His beard fell off his chin and started wriggling around on the table like a caterpillar.
Twilight didn’t notice, she just stared at Discord, her eye twitching. She leaned toward him and whispered, “Discord, we’re in a public place, there’s lots of innocent ponies around. You can’t just put a bomb under a table!” she spoke through gritted teeth.
Discord dismissively waved his paw in Twilight’s direction. “Oh come now, Twilight, you really think I’d put all those little ponies in danger? This bomb only has an effective range of about 2 meters. We are the only ones who’d be hurt by the explosion!” He laughed the hearty laugh of someone who was not sitting at a table with a bomb under it, accentuated by him throwing a teacup that he wasn’t holding a moment ago into the air with raucous flourish.
Twilight’s eye twitched. “D-Discord. I’m not exactly thrilled by the prospect of being blown up by a bomb. What makes you think you can do this? Th-That you can just put a bomb under the table? Did you seriously decide to use our time together to mess with me? You know Fluttershy wanted us to get along, right? But now you’ve put a bomb under the table. I-I don’t think I can overstate that! You put an actual bomb under the table! A-Are you actually trying to kill me?! Answer me, you deranged little—”
Twilight was snapped out of her tirade by a firm slap to the face delivered by Discord’s beard, which was now inching back toward him and reattaching itself to his chin.
He tutted. “Now now, Twilight, there’s no need to be so crass. How about you relax for a moment and let me make my point?” He slid back comfortably in his seat, and one of his horns rocketed into the sky, a new one with a sharper point quickly growing in its place. He pointed to it and smiled. “Get it? Point?”
Twilight ignored his joke. She didn’t relax her shoulders, but her expression softened as she slowed her breathing and lowered her hoof to the table. She sighed. “I-I suppose I should trust you, Discord.” Her face tensed up again for a moment. “E-Even though you’ve put a bomb under us.” She spat through her teeth.
Discord simply rolled his eyes. “Yes, yes, I’ve put a bomb under the table, we’re all quite aware of this by now.” He waved his paw dismissively. “Now, onto my point.” He snapped his talon and a Daring Do book appeared. He grabbed it out of the air and started flipping through it. “I know you’re an avid reader of this series, Twilight, but honestly I’m curious as to why. It seems a little below your standard of literary sophistication.”
Twilight scoffed. “A lot of ponies say that Daring Do is just a thoughtless adventure series, but there’s actually a lot of symbolism and insightful messages in the series. For example, in Daring Do and the Quest for the Sapphire Stone, Daring has to choose between retrieving the Sapphire Stone or saving her adventuring partner from getting injured. She was characterized at the start of the book as caring more about the treasures she retrieves than those around her, but she ultimately chooses to save her friend, even though he most likely would have survived had she decided to go for the treasure.”
Discord raised an eyebrow. “Really.”
Twilight blushed and absently waved a hoof, breaking eye contact with Discord. “It’s a lot more nuanced and impactful in the story; my explanation doesn’t really do it justice.” She gasped and looked back at Discord. “Oh! Do you want to start the series? I could totally lend you my copy of the definitive edition of the first book if you want! I know a lot of ponies say it doesn’t matter what version you read, but I think the additional foreword and afterword really give a lot of insight into A. K. Yearling’s writing process—”
Twilight was cut off by a cup of tea landing on her head and spilling everywhere. She sputtered, almost falling off her chair in surprise. She recovered and dried herself off with magic, ignoring the snickering draconequus across from her.
“Ha-ha, very funny, Discord. I take it you didn’t really care about Daring Do?” She slumped her shoulders. “You just wanted to cut me off while I was ranting about something I like, right?”
Discord cleared his throat. “Well, you’re half right. I did want to cut you off while you were ranting, that was quite funny!” He laughed a little more, earning a scowl from Twilight. “But I actually do care about Daring Do. I haven’t read past the first book myself— and herein lies my point —because I think it’s rather predictable.”
“Predictable!?” Twilight scoffed. “The Daring Do series has some of the best plot twists I’ve ever read! Like, in Daring Do and the Forbidden City of Clouds, it turns out that the Pegasus Idol is cursed, and that retrieving it wasn’t the end of Daring Do’s adventure in the City of Clouds, but the start of her adventure to escape it! It was one of the best twists I’ve ever read, hooves down.”
Discord simply looked at Twilight with his eyes half-lidded and a sly smile adorning his face. “Hmm. I’m sure those moments were lovely, Twilight, but have you considered what you surely had to ignore for that twist to be unexpected?”
Twilight raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean? I pay attention to every detail in the books I read; the insinuation that I would entirely ignore something is quite inaccurate.” Twilight said with a huff and a stomp on the ground.
Discord smiled and poked her nose. “Your nerd is showing. Now, despite your impossible claim that you pay attention to every last detail in your novels, there is something you must’ve ignored in order for the twist to be unexpected. When Daring Do is researching the City of Clouds near the start of the book, she passingly mentions the Cloudfolk and how territorial they are, and that they hide in the clouds until they are disturbed.”
“W-Well, okay, yeah, that’s true,” Twilight stammered. “But that doesn’t mean the twist is predictable! It just means it’s set up well!”
Discord rolled his eyes further back into his head than would be possible for anyone other than Discord. “Oh puh-lease, Twilight, it’s practically spelled out for you!” Discord placed a small fuse-lit firework on the table, a high-pitched hissing noise coming from it. “It would be like if I told you that this firework here will explode when the fuse reaches the end.”
Twilight raised her eyebrow. “Well, that just makes sense, though.”
“That’s exactly my point, Twilight! It also ‘just makes sense’ that a group of hidden Cloudfolk would be disturbed by the removal of the Pegasus Idol!” He shifted in his seat. “Try to see it from my perspective. Every setup like this relies on either conventional wisdom or knowledge that was given to the reader earlier in the story. That kind of setup and payoff is completely predictable! No chaos to be seen!”
“Well, okay,” Twilight started. “But if there was no setup, the payoff wouldn’t mean anything!”
Just then, Twilight noticed that the fuse had almost reached its end and braced herself for the explosion… which never came.
She tilted her head in confusion, then gasped in surprise when the now fuse-less firework hopped to turn itself around toward Twilight, showing her the cat face it sported on its side. The cat face hissed, making the same sound as a burning fuse, then jumped off the table.
“Oh.” Twilight sighed. “Well, I guess that just makes sense for you.”
“See, Twilight? There is a way for setups and payoffs to not be predictable!” Discord huffed and placed his chin on his claw. “It sure is a shame that pretty much every book these days has these predictable setups and payoffs.” He rolled his eyes, literally. As in, they rolled out of his head and onto the table.
Twilight rolled her eyes the normal way. “Maybe you have a point. I certainly enjoy your unpredictability… most of the time. Maybe I have been getting complacent with the predictability of novels these days—”
Discord shoved a finger over Twilight’s mouth, shushing her. “My dear Twilight, your complacency isn’t just with your predictable novels. Honestly, it’s astonishing how quickly you started treating a bomb underneath this table as if it were normal.”
Twilight gulped, her expression shifting to a concerned one again.
“You assume that just because we’re friends, that this bomb won’t go off. But that’s all a bomb is meant to do, isn’t it?” He shifted in his chair, not breaking eye contact with an ever-more anxious Twilight.
She gulped and tensed in her seat, trying to decide whether to trust Discord in spite of his words, try to run away, or do something about the bomb. She glanced down at it for a moment in her indecisiveness, which Discord noticed. He smiled.
“Let me give you a little more clarity on this situation, Twilight.” He snapped his fingers and a timer appeared, wires going from it to the bomb. It displayed only a single minute.
Discord didn’t say anything more, just looked at Twilight with half-lidded eyes.
Twilight took a deep breath, stared into Discord’s eyes, then turned her gaze to the timer and waited with bated breath for it to reach zero.
After what felt like hours of anxiously glancing back and forth between the agonizingly slow timer and Discord’s indifferent, almost smug gaze, it finally transitioned from one to zero, the last tick seeming to take twice as long as the previous ticks.
Twilight gasped sharply and braced herself, hiding her face behind her hooves instinctively. The bomb beeped rapidly as the timer went off, exacerbating Twilight’s anxiety.
She closed her eyes as the bomb gave off a long-note beep in a higher pitch, signifying that the bomb was about to go off.
There was a loud pop, and Twilight screamed.
…and then she opened her eyes. The table was gone, but instead of fire surrounding her and ash raining down, she was surrounded by fallen pieces of confetti, with more still raining down.
She breathed a hefty sigh of relief. “Oh, Discord, of course the bomb wouldn’t have actually been a bomb! Ha ha ha!” Her laughter was only half-genuine.
Discord playfully narrowed his eyes at Twilight and flicked his tail. “Now, my dear Twilight, do you really think I’d be so predictable as to meet your expectations like that?” His grin widened, and his eyes flicked upward for just a moment, confusing Twilight.
“What are you looking at—”
And then Discord’s rocket-horn fell right onto Twilight’s head.
