Signal to Noise

Chapters

The Worst Possible Thing
Princess Celestia's Good Advice That Twilight Doesn't Take
Twilight Sparkle's Excellent Chaos Adventure
Turn Up The Signal, Wipe Out The Noise

The Worst Possible Thing

"This is the WORST POSSIBLE THING!"

"Calm down, Twilight," Spike advised, his own voice a little bit frantic and high-pitched. "When Rarity says that we all know she doesn't really mean it, but you sound like you're actually serious!"

"I am serious!" Twilight grabbed Spike with her magic and pulled him to her, putting her hooves on his small shoulders and staring him directly in the eyes, face to face. "There are three hundred books missing with no record of who checked them out! This is horrible! Ponyville is going to throw me out of their library and exile me for being the worst librarian ever! Princess Celestia sent me to do this job and she'll be furious with me! Three hundred books!"

"I know it's a lot, but--"

"There's only six thousand books in the library total! FIVE PERCENT OF ALL THE BOOKS ARE GONE! No record of who checked them out! Or when! Or where!"

"Maybe we should talk to the police? Three hundred missing books is too many for us to just have missed checking out for ponies. Maybe somepony stole them!"

Twilight's hoof flew to her mouth. "That's it! Of course, Spike, that's brilliant! Of course somepony must have stolen them!" She reviewed the list of missing books. "There might even be a clue to who did it in the pattern of the missing books!"

"Somepony who liked comedy, I'm guessing," Spike said, pointing out the totals broken out by genre. "Two thirds of the humor section's missing."

"It couldn't be Pinkie, could it?"

"No way, Pinkie wouldn't steal from us!"

"I know, I know, but what if she went to check the books out and we weren't around so she tried to check them out for herself only she didn't know how to do it exactly right so she left the records someplace she thought we'd find them except it's Pinkie so who knows where she would have left them? We have to go ask her!" She started for the door.

"Whoa whoa!" Spike stood in front of the frantic unicorn, paw held out. "Pinkie knows how to check books out ‘cause she helped me out one time while you were doing some kind of research project! It can't be her."

Twilight deflated. "No, you're right," she said sadly. She'd been so hoping that was it; if the books had been taken by Pinkie, then nopony had stolen them and it would be easy to get them back. But Pinkie wouldn't have had an interest in history, not enough to check out almost every book pertaining to Equestrian history post-Discordian era. And certainly Pinkie wouldn't have taken out books on recent discoveries in physics and advanced mathematical theorems. "It couldn't have been Pinkie. But who would have stolen three hundred books? And how? If they took them all at once we'd have noticed! Even if they broke into the library while we weren't here, we'd have seen that many missing books!"

"I don't know, but I first started noticing books missing right after I got back from accidentally going to the... I mean spending a week sitting everypony's pets. And that was just a week ago!"

"So you think somepony took them while I was in the Crystal Empire dealing with the inspector for the Games? But how would we not have noticed so many books missing at once?"

"I don't know. Maybe a spell?"

"No, I'd have definitely noticed a spell." Twilight considered. "You said some books started being missing last week, but a lot of these books from the general fiction section are classics or bestsellers. We'd have noticed this many bestsellers missing if they'd all gone at the same time. I think maybe the thief has been coming back for more books. Maybe they took a bunch of books while we were gone, and they've been adding to it periodically."

Spike nodded. "That makes sense. That'd be why we didn't notice so many gone until we had all those problems today and closed to take inventory." Golden Oaks was not a busy library. Ponyville wasn't a large town to begin with, and it wasn't a hotbed of intellectual interchange, not like a small college town such as Ithacolt or Ponypsie. But it got busy on Saturdays, because ponies were looking for fun things to do for the weekend, and reading a best selling novel was a pastime most ponies enjoyed from time to time. This Saturday, however, half the bestsellers that anypony had tried to check out had turned out to be missing, so Twilight had closed the library to do inventory... and discovered the horror of three hundred missing books. Three hundred and twenty seven, to be exact. Two thirds of the humor section, almost all of the Equestrian history section, half the plays, a third of the classics, half the graphic novels, and while the books missing from bestsellers, science, mathematics and magic weren't a large percentage of the total of those sections, the missing books were the most recent ones, and therefore the most popular. Well, the new books on advanced magical theory weren't popular with anypony but Twilight, but she'd really been looking forward to reading them.

"Well. If there's a thief who keeps coming back for more books, then I know just what to do!"

"This isn't going to involve things exploding again, is it?"

Twilight grinned. "No, Spike. I'm going to cast a locator spell on all the books we have. And then as soon as we find there are any other books missing, I can use the locator spell to find the missing ones, and teleport right to the perpetrator! Or at least to his or her stash of stolen books."

"Huh. That does sound like a good idea," Spike said. "But just be careful about the teleporting part, okay?"

"I'm always careful when I'm teleporting!"

From Spike's expression it was apparent that he thought this was of dubious veracity, but he didn't press the issue. "Okay. Should we open the library back up?"

"No, not yet! Taking all the books off the shelf to inventory them has gotten dust all over the place! We need to mop and dust before we can re-open, Spike, that ought to be obvious."

"Well, excuse me," Spike muttered. "Did you know it's a scientifically proven fact that dragons can't see dirt?"

Twilight gave him a look. "Don't ever believe what you read in the popular science section of magazines, Spike," she said.

The next day, around closing time, Spike called to her. "Twilight! I found some of the missing books!"

"Really? Where! Where?" Twilight galloped over to the kitchen and came to a skidding stop.

"Um... in the laundry room."

"In the what?"

Spike handed her a book. "I don't think laundry is the right idea, but it looks like they do need a cleaning."

Was that... cheese all over the book? It was a history of the development of technology in Equestria over the past two hundred years, a dry tome she had never seen anypony check out, ever. But the last time she'd done book inventory, it was in pristine condition. Now there were smushed bits of cheese all over several of the pages... but that wasn't the worst. The worst were the bits of crushed fruit, blobs of jelly, and smears of chocolate. Whoever had been reading this book hadn't even bothered to try to not mess it up with their snacks.

Outraged, Twilight inspected the rest of the stack of books. A Connecticolt Stallion In Princess Platinum's Court, covered in cookie crumbs. She couldn't even tell what kind of cookie; it smelled lemony but looked like chocolate chip. Fractals, Butterflies and the Everfree, potato chips and peanut butter. The Great Fire of Baltimare, rice, seaweed, cucumbers, and blueberries. 1,001 Pegasus Pranks, cotton candy. Fear and Loathing In Las Pegasus, no food, but the heavy water damage and soapy scent suggested it had fallen in a bathtub. Collected Plays of Spear Shaker... bloodstains?

Twilight took a deep breath, eye twitching. "Spike?"

"Um, yeah?"

"You did laundry on Friday. Were these books in the laundry room then?"

"Of course not! If they had been, I'd have brought them up yesterday when we were inventorying all the books!"

"Somepony stole three hundred of my books, Spike," she said. "And then returned seven of them, ruined! Covered in food stains and, and water damage, and I don't even know what this is! So I am going to find them, and I am going to make them pay."

"Three hundred twenty books would be a lot of bits," Spike said. "They might not even have that kind of money."

"Oh no no no. They're not going to pay with bits, Spike. Not with bits at all." She began giggling madly.

"Uh, Twilight, are you okay?"

"I will be. Because the thief will come back, Spike. They'll ruin more books by being a total inconsiderate slob, so they'll come back and steal more. And when they do... when they do, I will find them. And whoever it is, I will make them pay."

"You're scaring me."

"Did you take my books and get food all over them?"

Spike was outraged. "Of course not! Twilight, how could you even ask--"

"It was a rhetorical question, Spike, I know you didn't take my books." She patted him on his head with her hoof. "And that's why you have nothing whatsoever to be scared of. Because nopony who is innocent of taking my books has anything to be scared of! But whoever stole these books... oh, they should be scared. They should be very scared."

"Are you gonna punch them in the face?"

Twilight blinked, the strange question breaking her free of her fit of psychotic laughter. "No, where would you get that idea? You shouldn't punch somepony in the face just for taking your books!"

"Oh, well, that's a relief--"

"But they're going to wish I had, Spike. They're going to wish that all I did to them was punch them in the face. BWAHAHAHAHA!"

"Okay, I am officially going to notify the princess about this. And maybe then get our friends. All of them."

"That's a great idea! Princess Celestia loves books! When she hears about this horrible book thief who ruins the books they steal, she'll want to banish them to the moon! What's left of them after I get through with them, anyway."

"Oookay... I’m going to go write that letter now..." Spike backed away.

Twilight cradled her damaged books in her magical field. "Oh, my books, my poor, poor books," she crooned at them. "Don’t worry, little bookies, Twilight will find a way to fix you. I -- I'm sure we won't have to... throw any of you out for being ruined..." She swallowed. "I'll find a way to fix you and clean you up, somehow. I'll find a spell. When we get all your other book friends back and I have all my spellbooks again, I'm sure of it. I'll save you all."

Author's Note

I... have no idea where this is going. I thought I knew where it was going and then it got away from me. Maybe it will still go the same place, but I suspect it will possibly have more detours along the way.

The reference to punching somepony in the face comes, of course, from Craine's "Discord Punches Twilight In The Face". Ithacolt and Ponypsie = Ithaca and Poughkeepsie, both small cities/towns with colleges in them in New York State.

Takes place post "Games Ponies Play"/"Just For Sidekicks" and before "Magical Mystery Cure".

I am not as bad as Twilight, but I am definitely channelling some personal experience here. :-)

Princess Celestia's Good Advice That Twilight Doesn't Take

"Dear Twilight, I can certainly understand your feelings – the destruction of a book is a sad thing indeed, and even damage is painful. I am sure the disappearance of over three hundred books has upset you greatly. But in the end, do remember that they are just books, not living ponies. They cannot feel pain. Please remain calm and do not do anything rash. Once you identify who is taking the books, I can send the Royal Guard to apprehend them and return your books to you, but do not try to confront this book thief yourself. Sincerely, Princess Celestia." Spike finished reading the letter triumphantly.

"Don't confront the book thief myself? She can't mean that! I'm the Ponyville librarian! I have to get those books back no matter what!" Twilight scrunched her mane in frustration. Surely her mentor hadn't meant for her to just stand by and let the Royal Guard gallop in and deal with this book thief? From Shining Armor's letters to her, she knew that most of the Guard didn't even read – Shining was one of the most intellectual ponies in the Guard, or had been before he moved to the Crystal Empire. Would they take proper care of her books? Would they even care that books were missing?

"Maybe she means we should do it for you!" Rainbow Dash said. "I could go kick their flank for you, Twilight! Soon as you find out who it is, I could charge right in there and pow!"

"I really appreciate the offer," Twilight said. "Especially since I know you don't care so much about books."

"Yeah, well, nerds have to have something to do on the weekends too, right? Besides, you said the thief took copies of all the Daring Do books!"

"We've got three copies of each and he or she didn't take the autographed ones, so at least there's that, but yes, there's one copy missing of each book in the series."

"Then there you go! Plus, they messed with my friend! Most books might be totally lame, but you like them and wanna protect them, so that means that messing with the books is messing with you, and nopony messes with Rainbow Dash's friends!"

"Still, I do think this situation might call for some diplomacy," Rarity said. "Anypony with the ability to take so many books directly under Twilight's nose... well, darling, perhaps we should be grateful that this thief only took books."

"Only took books?" Twilight was outraged. "Only? How could this possibly be any worse?"

"They could be an evil pony bent on world domination," Rarity pointed out. "If they're so powerful and so cunning as to take so many books from you, when you're one of Equestria's most powerful unicorns, perhaps the most powerful unicorn... well, I shudder to think who you might be up against. What if the miscreant is in essence another Sombra? Except with less dark magic and crystals, and more stealing books."

"I suppose..." Twilight mumbled.

"Who cares? Once I punch 'em in the face it doesn't matter who they are, they'll be out like a light! And then Twilight can get her books back!" Rainbow said enthusiastically.

"Rainbow, we're not punching anypony in the face! And anyway if anypony gets to punch somepony in the face for stealing books, it's going to be me," Twilight said.

"You told me you weren't going to punch anypony in the face!" Spike wailed.

"Well, I don't think so, but if it's some evil unicorn using dark magic to steal books I might have to."

"Why would an evil unicorn use dark magic to steal books?" Applejack asked. "You gotta be reasonable here, sugarcube. Your books are great, ain't knockin' them, but I can't see them bein' so great that somepony's gotta use dark magic to steal 'em. This is a library. Why didn't they just come check the books out?"

"That's what I want to know! Although if they were going to be such a slob and ruin the books they took out I would never have let them take out three hundred."

"Who even has time to read three hundred books?" Pinkie said. "I read super duper fast but even I couldn't read three hundred books in a few weeks, so I would only take out a few at a time! That's mean to everypony who wants to use the library to take them all out at once! Then nopony else can read them!"

"Doesn't make them an evil unicorn, though," Applejack said. "Just an inconsiderate jerk."

"Speaking of inconsiderate jerks, didja think maybe Discord did it?" Rainbow asked.

Twilight sighed. Fluttershy wasn't here, so she could speak frankly. "I thought about it, but this isn't his MO for a prank. If he was taking out the books to ruin my day he'd do it in front of my face so I'd know about it, and taking out a lot of books doesn't seem like much of a secret nefarious plan to spread chaos."

"But what if he just wanted to read them?" Pinkie asked.

Twilight gave Pinkie a look. "Knowing Discord, do you seriously think he'd like to sit still and read?" she asked.

"Sometimes I sit still and read! It's hard to read when you're bouncing because then your eyeballs go up and down, up and down, and you can't keep your place on the page, so you have to sit still when you read!"

"Yeah, well, the total lack of consideration for other ponies would be something I'd expect from Discord, but I just can't imagine him wanting to read. I mean, he eats books. How could you be a pony who likes to read if you're willing to ruin books?"

"Technically speaking he only ate individual pages," Rarity pointed out. "Though it was still a terrible thing to do to the books, I would imagine."

"Exactly. Ponies who like to read show books some respect. Even this jerk who's a book thief hasn't ripped any pages out. They're just a total slob."

"You think we should ask him anyway?" Rainbow Dash asked.

"It ain't like he'd tell the truth," Applejack said. "Anyway, if Twilight doesn't think it's Discord then we shouldn't be standing around blamin' him. That's not gonna get her books back."

"What if Princess Celestia herself took them as a test, Twilight?" Rarity asked.

"But... Princess Celestia would never ruin books!"

"But think. She instructed you to fight King Sombra without the Elements or our assistance. Had you failed that test, darling, the Crystal Ponies would be enslaved and you might be... well, considerably worse off than being a librarian facing the loss of three hundred books. So few of the books have been returned damaged, perhaps this is a test of your temperament. She advised you to remain calm and to direct the Royal Guard to the culprit once you find them. Could this be a test to see if you can remain calm in the face of such a dire provocation?"

Twilight considered. It was true that Princess Celestia had set her a very, very difficult test earlier this year. It was also true that Twilight's early lessons with Princess Celestia had focused heavily on self-control and reigning in negative emotions. And it was true that Princess Celestia's magic was very likely up to the task of stealing that many books. But she just couldn't believe her mentor would do this to her, knowing how much she loved books. "Princess Celestia didn't do this. I feel certain of it."

"Well, then I'm quite puzzled," Rarity said.

"We don't need to be solvin' this for Twilight, though. I think the plan to stake out the books with your magic is a good one, Twi. Just... listen to what the Princess said, and don't do anything rash once you find out who it is."

Twilight laughed. "Don't be silly! Of course I'll listen to the Princess, I always listen to the Princess! I won't do anything crazy."

"That's good."

Once her friends had gone, Twilight went about the library reinforcing the locator spells on the books. Spike appeared to be nervous for some reason. "You're really going to do what the Princess said and not go running off to catch this book thief when you find them, right?"

"Don't be silly, Spike, when have I ever not done what the Princess asked me to do?"

Spike was too young to notice that Twilight hadn't answered the question... just as she'd planned. She hadn't wanted to lie to her little assistant. He grinned, obviously reassured, and went to bed, leaving Twilight to finish her work.

Anypony powerful enough to take this many books right out from under her nose was way above the level the Royal Guard could deal with. She hadn't lied to Applejack... she wouldn't do anything rash or crazy. She would just find the book thief and force them to return the books, no problem. If they were weak enough that the Royal Guard could deal with them, then Twilight should be able to handle getting her books back with no trouble at all, and afterward she'd direct the Royal Guard to arrest them... once the books were safe. If they weren't... then no Guardsponies would get injured taking on a threat too big for them.

If this was a test, Twilight intended to pass it. And if it wasn't... well, she was still going to get her books back, by hook or by crook.

For two days there was nothing. On the third day Spike found more returned books, under the bed in the guest bedroom. The original three hundred twenty-seven missing had been knocked down to three hundred fourteen. Not that this would in any way spare the book thief from Twilight's righteous wrath, once she caught him or her. Two of the newly returned books were still in mint condition, and two of them had nothing wrong but a broken spine... but one of them was suffering from severe water damage, and the last had globs of peanut butter on the inside front cover.

Four days into Bookwatch, Twilight was up late reading when she sensed something. A faint thread of power, of some kind. She followed it carefully, feeling for it, tracking it into a dim shadow.

It was a cat's eyeball with wings.

Twilight's own eyes nearly bugged out of her head as she saw the flying cat's eyeball, its tiny, leathery, bat-like wings flapping, roaming across her bookshelves, looking at the spines of the books. Reading them... maybe. Hard to tell with a disembodied eyeball. She reached out to examine the eyeball with her own magic, and also to catch it, but the moment her power touched it, it... popped. Like a balloon. Except that balloons would leave behind broken bits of balloon material, whereas there was no evidence whatsoever that the eyeball had ever been there after it popped.

"I am not going crazy," she mumbled to herself. "That was magic. Somepony... put... wings... on an eyeball..." Now that she was spelling it out to herself, it sounded even more absurd. She'd had some magical mishaps of her own in her time – oranges turned to frogs, parasprites eating buildings, turning her parents into potted plants – but this was almost deliberately absurd. Who would send an eyeball roaming the stacks of the library? Who would put wings on one?

Well, she knew of one potential culprit – Discord. It had been just over a month since Princess Celestia had asked Fluttershy to reform the Spirit of Chaos, and while Discord had willingly admitted that "friendship is magic", and had told Princess Celestia that he would use his magic for good instead of evil (most of the time), Twilight still didn't trust him as far as she could throw him, and he looked pretty heavy at his size. However, stealing books stealthily and then returning them dirty or water-damaged still didn't seem like a Discord-level nefarious plot. If Discord wanted to steal her books, she would have imagined he'd break into the library with a kazoo and play on it like a demented Pied Piper, leading the books to dance and skip on their own out of their shelves and off with him. Or he'd gloat. Or he'd show up to make snide remarks about the missing books. The fact that the books had been missing for some time suggested that it couldn't be Discord playing a prank on her, because he was about as subtle as the Friendship Express.

Who else could it be, though? Princess Celestia and Princess Luna would have this level of power, but wouldn't harm books... unless this was a test, as Rarity had suggested. Sombra was dead and anyway this kind of thing, as horrifying as it was to Twilight personally, seemed petty for an evil overlord who'd enslaved and terrorized an entire nation. Could the flying eyeball be a changeling in disguise? No, a changeling wouldn't have popped like that.

Maybe it was somepony Twilight had never heard of. For example, maybe Princess Celestia had had another student before her who had gone mad with power and been rejected as a result and was now in exile plotting to steal things from Twilight so she could regain her former abilities and attack Equestria, or something.

No. That was positively ridiculous.

On the fifth day, Twilight was up late again – the truth was, she hadn't really slept much since discovering the missing books – when she felt her spell trigger. Gotcha!

She tracked the thread of magic she'd attached to all of the books, following it, and teleported after it. It felt, at first, as if she were headed toward Canterlot – which would be problematic, because Twilight couldn't teleport that far. She pushed more energy into it – and then lost the thread. Panicking, because she was between and if she didn't know where she was going and she didn't have an anchor to attach herself to, she could theoretically be lost forever, Twilight summoned everything she had and flailed outward, trying to grab onto her book-tracking spell.

And found it.

Relieved, Twilight homed in on the spell, materialized – and found herself standing on a pile of books.

Twilight picked up the first book near her hooves telekinetically, and examined it. This one was from the Canterlot library – the main library, not the archives, the Library of Magic or Princess Celestia's private reserves, but the main Canterlot lending library. It was How To Win Friends and Influence Ponies, a book Twilight had read herself and rejected as being entirely too manipulative. Friends should be friends, not stepping stones to wealth or power. The next book she picked up was also from the Canterlot library, and was an absolutely ancient record of an archeological dig down in Mexicavallo. The next was a collection of comic books about an earth pony stung by a manticore who, instead of dying or being eaten by the manticore, somehow gained manticore magic, dubbed herself the Magnificent Manti-Mare and began fighting crime. That one was from Ponyville.

The book pile was huge, much too large for Twilight to avoid stepping on books. She couldn't even see the floor under it. Wobbling in her effort to avoid crushing books with her hooves, and apologizing to the books she stepped on, Twilight made her way down to the bottom of the pile, picking up books and stacking them as she went so they would at least not be in a big random pile that ponies could step on. Focused as she was on the books under her hooves, Twilight didn't even notice she had reached the end of the pile until she took a step onto empty air.

Twilight flailed wildly, trying to use her magic to push herself back onto the book pile. She succeeded, landing on it rump down. This caused the hoofful of books she was sitting on to detach from the rest of the pile... and float, a short distance away. For the first time, Twilight took stock of her actual surroundings, rather than the pile of books under her, and gulped.

She was floating in nothingness. The nothing had an orange cast to it, rather than the blue of sky or the black of night, but other than that its only distinguishing feature from the pictures of upper atmosphere that pegasi had taken was the lack of either sun or moon up above. There was light, diffuse and orange, even and mild enough not to hurt her eyes while bright enough to read easily. But there was no source of light – it just seemed to be everywhere – and as a result neither Twilight nor anything else had shadows.

Carefully Twilight probed with her magic. There was no enchantment on the book pile. She had no idea how it was floating. The small piece that had broken off drifted a short distance away from the rest of the pile. There was nothing to explain why it didn't fall to pieces under Twilight's flanks and leave her to plunge to her death, or something.

It was very responsive to telekinesis, though. A tiny nudge, and the small book pile easily floated back to join the larger one. Twilight climbed backward up the pile, trying to put a safe distance between herself and the nothingness all around.

She felt very light, almost as if she might float away herself, but when she experimentally tried jumping, she didn't get much of anywhere. The book pile somehow had gravity and was holding her in place. Luna had told her that on the moon there was very little gravity and ponies could leap enormous distances, and pegasus flight was potentially dangerous because a pegasus could actually end up in airless space outside the moon's thaumic field if they tried to fly too quickly. That didn't appear to be the case here. On the other hand, she found that she was able to levitate herself with ease. On Earth, unicorns couldn't self-levitate because there was no ground under their feet to push against; lifting an object with magic required that the opposite reaction, the weight of the object, be channeled back through the unicorn into the ground. Unicorns with extraordinary amounts of power could do it in theory, and she herself had levitated more than once while wielding the Elements of Harmony, but this felt so simple and easy a foal could do it. It did, however, unnerve her greatly, given that there wasn't actually any ground anywhere and she feared losing the security of the book pile, so she stopped quickly. At least, she thought, if she fell off the books, she could catch herself.

This suggested that she could safely explore to the edge and see if anything was visible underneath this thing, holding it up. Carefully Twilight edged out onto the book pile, lying herself flat on the books when she got close to the boundary with the nothingness, and craned her head over. Nothing. She leaned a bit further. Still more nothing. But there had to be something holding this pile of books up! This simply wasn't possible! Gritting her teeth with aggravation, Twilight tried leaning further out.

The books she was lying on gave. For a horrible moment she was falling. And then she was on her back, on the book pile, except it looked somewhat different. Twilight picked up a few books and looked at their covers to confirm her theory. She had just fallen onto the other side of the book pile... which was also a book pile, and had the same properties as the side she'd been on first, namely that it had gravity. Twilight's eyes began to twitch violently. Something that had gravity on both sides was, for all intents and purposes, a cosmic object, such as the moon or the earth itself. Cosmic objects were huge, that was where their gravity came from. No raggedy book pile could have gravity on both sides. None of this made any sense.

She took a deep breath. "So I guess I was wrong about it being Discord," she muttered.

She couldn't teleport home from here; there was nothing to let her get her bearings and figure out where "here" was in relation to home. She certainly couldn't teleport home with all these books, under any circumstances. There were plainly more than three hundred here; he'd been raiding the Canterlot library as well. Why? What kind of evil plan involved stealing books and getting soap on them? All of these books were in fairly pristine condition, if you didn't count her hoofprints on the more fragile ones. This wasn't an elaborate prank on her if he'd been taking books from Canterlot as well.

A horrible thought occurred to her. Was this his pantry? Was he going to eat all these books? Had the few that had been returned with food stains proven to be unpalatable for some reason?

If so, Twilight Sparkle, Element of Magic and Ponyville Librarian, was not going to stand for it. It was high time she found the master of this weird... place, or whatever it was... and gave him a piece of her mind. And possibly, if necessary, a punch in the face.

With some trial and error she found she could move a group of books away from the larger pile and use them as a sort of magic carpet. After rearranging her transport so it was a neatly laid out flooring with books overlapping other books in a structurally sound way rather than a totally random pile, she was able to sit down on it and direct it forward with her telekinesis. This space couldn't be endless. Sooner or later, she had to run into Discord.

Right?

Author's Note

Tags updated. Yeah, you didn't think this story was going to go without the Discord tag forever, did you really? :twilightsmile:

Twilight Sparkle's Excellent Chaos Adventure

There was no way to tell time in this endless orange space, but from the aching in her eyes and the growling in her belly, Twilight could assess that she'd been flying her book floor around for probably hours, and had not found Discord. She had, however, found some other giant piles with gravity on both sides, such as a giant pile of clothing – which had confirmed that the culprit here had to be Discord, because nopony could possibly have fit into the long, skinny outfits with mismatched sleeve sizes, and the few pairs of pants she'd found had a tail hole far, far too wide for a pony's needs, a hole that would in fact have rendered the entire purpose of pants moot had it been on a pony's backside. The giant pile of random eggs from what seemed to be hundreds of species, with three tiny heat-radiating, glowing objects that resembled nothing so much as the sun, if the sun was the size of a pony's hoof, orbiting about it, had surprised her... why would Discord need so many eggs? And what were the mini-suns doing, incubating the eggs? A third floating pile she found consisted of nothing but shower curtains. Two other piles seemed to be completely random junk, with no unifying theme whatsoever.

Apparently Discord hoarded things. Well, he was part dragon. Hopefully the presence of his clothes meant this was some kind of closet, not a pantry, though given the things she'd seen Discord eat, she couldn't rule it out.

A flash of green caught Twilight's attention. She turned to look at it. Floating in the distance was a vaguely elliptical green ring with something light-colored inside it. It wasn't a giant pile of something, which made it the most interesting thing Twilight had found so far. She levitated herself and her book floor over to get a closer look at it.

Up close, it was definitely some sort of dimensional portal, leading into a room made of pale cream and dark brown marble. That didn't look chaotic enough to be one of Discord's decorating schemes, which meant it might well be a way out of here. Twilight piloted the book collection close to the portal, at which point it unexpectedly turned into a vortex. She screamed as it pulled the books she was on top of in, despite her best effort to hold them together, and then her.

Twilight fell face-first into a puddle of pudding.

Once she got her legs under herself – which was difficult, as her hooves kept sliding on the pudding – she managed to rub enough of the pudding out of her eyes to see properly. The "marble" the room she was in had appeared to be made of was marbled pudding. It looked like vanilla and chocolate, but tasted like cream cheese, bananas, mint and cinnamon, with a bit of pumpkin thrown in. And of course, the books she'd been riding on were now saturated with it.

Sighing, Twilight decided to make a safe space for the books to sit. Her first thought was the corner, but no – the walls were also pudding rather than actual marble. Using magic, she pushed the pudding on the floor out of the way in a square large enough to contain the books if they were neatly stacked, then cast a spell to freeze the pudding at the edges magically, so it would solidify and hold its shape. It wasn't an actual freeze spell that manipulated cold, but a solidification spell, so she wasn't worried about it melting. She stacked the books up, cleaning pudding off them as she did so.

Once the books were protected, she bent her head down and ate pudding. She'd gotten quite hungry and thirsty in her time driving the book platform around, and while the taste of the pudding was decidedly weird, it wasn't bad. The moisture helped to quench her thirst at least a little bit, though she would have given a lot for some cold water.

What she was actually standing on resembled obsidian, or black glass at least. She didn't know how the pudding clung to it so evenly, but she was dealing with Discord, so there was no point in trying to figure it out. The combination of the incredibly smooth surface below her hooves and the pudding up to her fetlocks made the floor treacherously slippery, reminding her of the time Discord had turned the roads to soap. And then she remembered how he and Pinkie had both navigated those soap roads by skating on them rather than walking. Carefully Twilight slid her hooves across the glass, gliding – albeit slowly, clumsily, and against the pressure of a considerable quantity of pudding – toward the doorway that she saw on the other side of the room. It was not a large room, though the ceiling was very high – pony architecture often had high ceilings in public places to accommodate pegasi, but this room's ceiling was almost as tall as the ones in Canterlot Palace, despite the room being no bigger than the main storefront of Sugarcube Corner.

Twilight pushed the door open, noting that the pudding did not follow her, and stepped out onto a thick green velvet flooring that made her feel like a terrible pony for tracking pudding onto it. She looked up, taking in her surroundings. This was a hallway so long she couldn't see the other end of it, the walls decidedly muted for Discord – they were striped, and the stripes followed no pattern aside from being mostly vertical and largely rectangular, but the colors were pale, cream and washed-out pink and watery blue and other colors of very low intensity. Artwork hung on the walls.

More things Discord had stolen? It wasn't enough for him to rob libraries, now he was an art thief too? She could certainly see why he'd taken these particular pieces, though. One was a desert landscape with inexplicable furniture holding up clocks that had melted. One was a tile representation of a pony, except that many of the tiles were misaligned or flipped, so that when she unfocused her eyes or tilted her head, she could for moments see a simple farmhouse instead of a pony in the pattern of the tiles. One was a magically animated painting featuring a ballerina in shadow, perpetually spinning on one hoof, except that Twilight couldn't figure out what direction she was actually spinning in; she seemed to change mid-spin, but not in a way that suggested an actual magical change, rather that Twilight's perception would shift to recognize that she had always been spinning in the new direction. There was the sun hatching out of an egg, there was a painting of an endless, impossible staircase, there was a vase in an alcove that suddenly appeared to be two ponies conversing without the actual image changing at all. Some of the paintings were random splatters of color. All of the pieces were weird, simultaneously eye-catching and disturbing.

The thing was, Twilight didn't recognize any of them. She'd read many books on art history, and never seen any of these. Either Discord stole them so long ago that they didn't make it into the books, or... A thought both horrifying and exciting began to blossom in her head. What if this was actual Discordian Era artwork? It was widely believed that all records from the Discordian Era were lost, no art, books, or verbal tales more complex than simple bogeyman tales to scare foals surviving to the modern age. But Discord had been the ruler, of a sort, and in all societies she'd ever heard of, rulers were major patrons of the arts. She'd always tended to assume that Discord had interacted with ponies in the same ways he had when he broke free, that they would have all been uniformly terrorized by him and treated as his toys. That was probably true, but at the same time... Sombra had commissioned art. And Discord was arguably more creative and artistic himself than Sombra.

Were these works that ponies under his rule had created for him, in exchange for rewards or possibly just being left alone? Or maybe simply inspired by the everyday chaos around them, and Discord had taken the art they'd made and put it in his vault because he'd liked it? There were treasures here, masterpieces forgotten by ponykind. She continued to walk down the hallways, staring riveted at the paintings (and other works... there were magically animated images, there were carefully crafted automata, there were statues made of jello and she had no idea how that thing held together under its own weight, there were dollhouses depicting buildings that were impossible to construct even with magic). One painting was of Discord himself, rendered in angular shapes that didn't quite line up with each other, creating a highly distorted but still recognizable image. Had somepony imagined this, or had Discord actually taken this form? There was an island with a small town, on the back of a giant fish. Had Discord made such a thing, and a pony of the time had painted a realistic view of what they'd seen, or did this come from a pony's mind? There was a waterfall, falling up and splashing into an upside-down lake spread out across the sky. There was a stallion calmly fighting an attack of lemons with an umbrella. There was a beautiful mare whose pupils had teeth.

"This is incredible," Twilight murmured to herself. "How long has this stuff been here? Has he really had it stashed away for more than a thousand years?"

"HAST THOU QUESTIONS ABOUT THE GALLERY?" a creaky, echo-y voice asked.

"Gah!" Startled, Twilight jumped, and turned to face the speaker – a skeleton. "AAAAH!" She threw up a shield around herself, shrieking.

The skeleton didn't move. It wore a vivid purple cloak, edged in gold, with a hood that only partially concealed its skull. The voice was feminine. "I AM THE KEEPER OF NAMES," the skeleton said. "SHOULDST THOU WISH TO KNOW THE NAMES OF THOSE WHO CREATED THESE WORKS, NEEDST THOU ONLY ASK AND I SHALL SAY."

"Uhh." Twilight lowered the shield, but not her guard. "Um. What is this place?"

"THIS IS THE GALLERY OF DISCORD. HERE, OUR PINECONE DISCORD PRESERVES THE WORKS OF PONIES WHO HAVE DEMONSTRATED A CREATIVE, FREE MIND, UNTETHERED BY THE LIMITS OF MUNDANE, ORDERED REALITIES."

That was pretty much what Twilight had thought it was. "Pinecone?" She raised her eyebrow. "Why is Discord a pinecone?"

"'TIS CUSTOMARY TO ADDRESS THE LORD OF CHAOS WITH TITLES OF RESPECT THAT MEAN NOTHING, WHICH ARE CHOSEN AT RANDOM. OUR CABINET PIN DISCORD SHOULD NOT BE ADDRESSED WITH TITLES THAT CONVEY A SENSE OF HIERARCHY AND ORDER, SUCH AS 'KING' OR 'LORD'."

"But you just called him 'Lord of Chaos'."

"THAT IS NOT A TITLE OF RESPECT. 'TIS MERELY AN ACCURATE DESCRIPTION. SKY PANDA DISCORD DOES IN TRUTH CONTROL CHAOS, HENCE 'LORD OF CHAOS' IS CORRECT."

"Are you a real skeleton? I mean, are you a dead pony that Discord used magic to resurrect as a skeleton, or...?"

"THY QUESTIONS SEEM CONFUSING AND POINTLESS. THAT IS THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM. THOU SEEMST THUS WELL EQUIPPED TO STUDY CHAOS. HAS BONGO DRUMS DISCORD BROUGHT THEE TO THIS PLACE FOR STUDY?"

"Um... not exactly. I sort of got here on my own. Wait a minute, why do you keep calling me 'thou'? I mean, I know you're from at least a thousand years ago and that's how ponies talked then, but I thought ponies only used 'thou' to friends and family, or to social subordinates. Are you some kind of superpowerful lich and that's why you keep calling me 'thou', because you think you're my superior or something like that?"

"I AM NO LICH. I AM BUT THE KEEPER OF NAMES. TO BESPEAK ANOTHER PONY ALONE AS 'YOU' IS TO BASELY CRAVE ONE'S OWN SUBJUGATION AND SLAVERY. NO PONY IS GREATER THAN ANY OTHER PONY; ALL ARE EQUAL IN THE EYES OF CHAOS, AND MAY BENEFIT OR SUFFER EQUALLY BY THE WINDS OF CHANCE. THEREFORE ALL PONIES SHOULD BE 'THOU' TO ONE ANOTHER, AND TO ADDRESS A SINGLE OTHER PONY AS 'YOU' IS TO SAY THAT THEY ARE MANY IN COMPARISON TO ONE AND THEREFORE OF GREATER RANK OR VALUE, YET ALL PONIES ARE EQUALLY LOWLY AND NONE SHOULD HOLD RANK OR RULE OVER ANOTHER. I SPEAK ONLY TO A GROUP OF PONIES AS 'YOU'. WHY DOST THOU OTHERWISE?"

"Welll... you've been in here a long time, and the language has changed. Now ponies just all say 'you' to one another all the time and hardly anypony even knows how to use 'thou'."

"INTERESTING, TWILIGHT SPARKLE. I SHALL CONSIDER THY WORDS, BUT 'TIS TOO SOON TO CHANGE MY CUSTOM ON THY WORD ALONE."

"Wait, how do you know my name?"

"I AM THE KEEPER OF NAMES. SUCH IS MY NATURE," the skeleton said. "HAST THEE A QUESTION REGARDING THESE WORKS, OR SHALL I LEAVE THEE BE TO PERUSE THEM?"

"Um. So you know the names of the ponies who created these?" She pointed at the picture of the endless staircase. "Who did that one?"

"THAT PAINTING IS 'UP THE DOWN STAIRCASE' BY MORE CURLY ETCHER."

"And that weird painting of Discord that's all distorted? Who did that one, and was it a painting from life – like did Discord actually look like that or did the painter make it up?"

"THAT PAINTING WAS CREATED BY STONE MAGPIE. 'TWAS HIS STYLISTIC AFFECTATION FOR MANY SUCH PAINTINGS, TO DISTORT HIS SENSES' PERCEPTION IN SUCH A WAY. A PAINTING THAT IS TRUE TO LIFE IS NO TRUE CHAOS, EVEN SHOULD IT BE PAINTED OF CHAOS. TO MY KNOWLEDGE NONE SUCH ARE PRESENT HERE; ALL COME FROM THE CHAOS OF MIND AND IMAGINATION."

"Wow." Of course, the artists had probably been inspired by the world of chaos outside their windows, but even so, to create all this strange and different art seemed an amazing accomplishment to Twilight. Pony art was generally either realistic, or stylized in some way – such as the stained glass windows and the paintings in the book about Nightmare Moon that Twilight had first consulted to learn about the thousand-year-prophecy, or the exaggeration of comic books. Art that was both realistic and completely unnatural, such as the melted clocks or the stallion fighting lemons, or art that was stylized to the point of distortion, like Stone Magpie's work... she'd never seen anything like it. "This could revolutionize the art world," she murmured. "I wonder if Rarity could get any inspiration from this? But here it is hidden away where nopony can possibly see it!" To distract herself from growing levels of frustration that had no outlet, she pointed at the melted clocks. "Who did that one?"

"DOLL SAVIOR."

"Did all ponies during the Discordian Era have ridiculous names?" Doll Savior? More Curly Etcher? Stone Magpie? What kinds of names were those? More Curly Etcher didn't even make any sense, unless there were a lot of foals in the Etcher family and More Curly was the one with the curliest mane.

"I DO NOT KNOW THE NAMES OF ALL PONIES, ONLY THE NAMES OF THOSE WHOSE ART IS FOUND HERE."

"How about this one?" Twilight pointed at a painting of a mother rocking a foal, who was holding on her lap a toy teacup, and in the teacup there was a mother rocking a foal, who was holding a teacup, and when Twilight used magic to magnify the piece, she found at least two more mothers, foals and teacups, and for all she knew it went down even further than that.

"JENNIFER LINT."

Twilight blinked. That had to be the most ridiculous name of all. What did "Jennifer" even mean? It was just a collection of nonsense sounds.

She took a deep breath. "This gallery is beautiful, and any other time, I'd love to walk up and down it for hours, but I need to find Discord. Do you know where he is?"

"IF CHISEL GRAPEFRUIT DISCORD IS ON THE PREMISES, I DO NOT KNOW HIS WHEREABOUTS. HOWEVER, I CAN SUMMON THE SKALBOGGAN TO TAKE THEE SOMEWHERE. IT WILL NOT NECESSARILY BRING THEE TO PENCIL PIE DISCORD, BUT IT WILL NOT NECESSARILY FAIL TO DO SO EITHER." The Keeper walked a short distance down the hallway and pressed a green button with her hoof, and it lit up.

"I guess that's probably the best you can do," Twilight said. "Wait, what's the Skalboggan?"

"THE REINDEER CALL A PILLBUG 'KLAPPAR SKALBAGGE'. THE SKALBOGGAN IS A VEHICLE THAT SLIDES ON SPACE-TIME LIKE A TOBOGGAN."

Twilight was going to ask what the name of a pillbug had anything to do with a vehicle, until the Keeper threw the door open, and her attention was caught by the outside. The sky here was a purplish black, in some places a darker purple than she thought could technically exist on the color spectrum. Webs of blue light and bands of lighter purple snaked through space in every direction, illuminating everything evenly. She looked down, and swallowed with sudden vertigo. There was no ground. That wasn't the sky, that was space, and this entire gallery was floating in it. But it wasn't space as she understood space to truly be, from her studies – actual space was a vacuum, saturated with magic in an aura around the Earth that steadily grew weaker until it passed the sun and the moon, where it dissipated and left cold nothingness. This space was full of dense, almost viscous magic, magic that felt like it might flow like ketchup, but when she tried to manipulate it with her horn, it gave her what felt like an electric jolt and then made her feel jittery, like she'd had several cups of coffee. There was far, far more magic here than in Equestria, and it was far stronger, but there seemed to be very little reining it in. The tiniest spark could set it off and make it do... anything, she thought, and shivered.

Then a creature loomed out of nowhere, appearing as a tiny spot and expanding to enormous size very rapidly. It would have looked as if it had zoomed in quickly had it been pointed toward the gallery, but its long side was parallel to the doorway. Also, Twilight had been touching the magic of the area at the time, and had sensed the local field being disrupted before it had appeared. It was gray, and insectoid, looking like... a giant pillbug. If pillbugs had soft gray fuzz on their armored plates, and giant, non-insectoid, spherical white eyes with eyelids and pupils, and windows in the armored plates that showed an interior roughly similar to a train car. It waved its antenna feverishly in the air.

"Is... that... the Skalboggan?" Twilight asked uneasily, backing up.

"INDEED. THE SKALBOGGAN WILL TAKE YOU TO A LOCATION WHICH MAY OR MAY NOT ALSO CONTAIN BRUSHBALL DISCORD. SIMPLY STEP INTO ITS MOUTH." Said mouth yawned wide open, revealing a plush, almost silken carpet and a quarter-domed room with a matching silk pattern hung on the walls/ceiling (the quarter-hemisphere shape of the room made it impossible to tell where the walls stopped and the ceiling started.)

"A-are you sure it's safe?" Twilight backed away from the door some more, now that the Skalboggan had rotated itself slightly to line its mouth up with the door. "That's a mouth."

"YES, THAT IS HOW ONE GAINS TRANSPORT ABOARD THE SKALBOGGAN. IT IS PERFECTLY SAFE. CHAOS WHICH CAUSES DEATH IS ENTROPY AND ENTROPY LEADS TO HOMOGENEITY, WHICH DOES NOT THEN CHANGE. ONLY CHAOS THAT RESULTS IN CONTINUING CHANGE IS WORTHWHILE CHAOS."

Twilight wondered if Discord had ever been the leader of a cult, or something. The Keeper seemed to have all kinds of interesting opinions about chaos that she'd almost certainly gotten from Discord, but Discord didn't seem to be interested in teaching anypony the "true meaning of chaos" in his opinion anymore. "It won't... eat me or something?"

"THE SKALBOGGAN EATS ONLY UNCOOKED SPAGHETTI, AND OCCASIONALLY THE WAILING SOULS OF THE EVIL DEAD. AS THOU ART NEITHER DEAD, NOR SPAGHETTI, AND HAST SHOWN ME NO SIGN OF EVIL THUS FAR, I PRESUME THEE TO BE SAFE."

That... was probably not as reassuring as the Keeper had intended it to be, but Twilight decided to take it in the spirit that it was given. "Oookay, then." Hesitantly she stepped forward, horn at the ready just in case anything happened.

The interior of the Skalboggan's mouth smelled like dirt, but as soon as she passed through the doorway in the back of its throat into the carriage, the scent became orange mint. By now Twilight had stopped looking for explanations for anything, and simply sat down on a cushion by the window. "Skalboggan, could you take me to Discord?"

The Skalboggan meowed, loudly.

And then Twilight felt space warp around her. She gasped, feeling the thick magic of this chaotic dimension flowing past like they were somehow riding on top of it. Nothing was visible through the windows but bands of bright blue and dark purple, fluctuating wildly. Unconsciously she braced herself against the floor, hooves grasping against smooth chitin.

Suddenly they came to a stop. Or rather the space around them seemed to come to a stop, because there was no inertia, no jerk forward or backward, either when the Skalboggan had started moving or when it stopped. It meowed again, and the door she had come through irised open.

"Uh, thanks, Skalboggan," Twilight said. "Have a nice day!" Did they even have days and nights in this land of chaos? Twilight stepped out and through a strange door that seemed to be halfway up a wall, on a purple and vermilion stuccoed building with a roof that was plainly made of overlapping shingles of cheese. She tripped as she entered, fell several heads, landed hard on a smooth plaster floor, and found herself in a room that was upside down. There was a comfy couch and tall lamp shaped like Discord himself sitting neatly on the ceiling, along with some end tables holding equally gravity-defying bric-a-brac, and nothing on the floor but a fan. The fan blades were actual palm fronds, spinning slowly.

There was no clear way out of the room. The doorways were a few heads above her. There seemed to be a skylight in the floor, but fish were swimming in it. Even the windows didn't quite reach low (high?) enough for her to get out through one. And of course there was no sign of Discord anywhere. Because that would have involved the universe allowing things to be convenient for Twilight Sparkle for a single split second, and obviously that couldn't be allowed.

A sudden rage at all things chaos overwhelmed Twilight. She stomped her hooves, pawing at the floor and snorting in frustration. This entire day had just been the most utterly irritating thing ever, and when she found Discord she was going to punch him in the face twice. Once for taking her books and once for subjecting her to all of this nonsense. There was nothing in the room, nopony or creature to be harmed, so she lashed out, taking out her anger by firing her magic into the air around her, not even particularly aiming at anything.

Something ripped, something that felt like a thing that should never be ripping, something that felt too basic and bedrock to reality to ever rip, and then there was a portal gaping in front of her, looking out over a sunny garden full of singing flowers, of every possible color, all singing different songs at the same time, and she was pretty sure none of them were in key. A glowing sun-like smiling foal head drifted in the sky above the flowers, giggling, every so often chased by a bone-white horsehead. Twilight was no expert on horses – she actually found them a little bit creepy, given how similar they looked to ponies but without intelligence and language, and with their eyes on either side of their head rather than pointing forward like pony eyes -- but she thought the horsehead was probably a mare's.

She took a deep breath. The portal she'd inadvertently created didn't seem to be causing reality to collapse, any more than it was already collapsing in this place of chaos anyway. The sight outside the portal was freaky, but standard Discord-level freaky, not "space and time are imploding" level. And the fact that she could make portals implied... well, that she could make portals.

Twilight tried to replicate what she'd done, deliberately. It took some doing; she hadn't been carefully tracking what she'd been doing the first time, and hadn't in any way expected a random firing of her horn to tear a hole in the fabric of space. When she finally got it, she managed to tear another, smaller portal... which was a good thing, because it looked like she'd placed this one in a body of water, and it started pouring water through the hole, along with very strange creatures that looked like frog-fish, as if a tadpole had been caught halfway through metamorphosis, where they had frog heads and forelegs, but a fish-like back end. Worried for the sake of the wildlife, Twilight tried to seal the portal, but somehow just ended up creating another one, so the water was now pouring out from the one portal into another, where she could see it gracefully dropping a couple of yards before splooshing onto a tiled floor. It looked as if she'd somehow managed to dump the water in a bathroom, at least – a literal bathroom, there was no visible toilet but there was a huge, deep, sunken bathtub that was almost large enough to be a swimming pool.

The next portal Twilight created sent wind gusting through the room she was in, blowing some of the water off course to splatter on the floor/ceiling below her. She managed to make another portal directly in front of it for the wind to blow into. The first portal seemed to be coming from a forest of shiny pinwheels, all spinning and glittering in the stiff breeze; the second one led to the empty purple and blue space the Skalboggan had flown (through? On? Was flown even the right verb? It had almost felt like it was surfing).

She was getting the hang of this now. Space itself seemed tissue-thin somehow; magic that would simply dissipate into the air in Equestria was actually breaking holes in the fabric of space, here. Teleportation ought to be an absolute breeze, here, if it weren't for the fact that she didn't know where anything was and couldn't possibly visualize a destination and had no idea where she was in relation to home, so she couldn't teleport there, either. But she was beginning to get a vague sense of what was behind the portals she was ripping before she ripped them – something about the way the space felt. The space around the water hole had felt heavy and thick – full, like a soaked sponge. The area with the pinwheels and the strong winds felt... more chaotic than other places did, but only on the surface. Like ripples on the top of a pond rather than waves in the ocean. She had a good idea that she didn't want to open up a portal anyplace where the other side felt like an ocean of chaos.

Here was a place that felt... warm. She couldn't describe it any other way. Warm like friction, not warm like heat; space that was rubbed a lot. That didn't really make any sense, but then, none of this really made any sense, so Twilight tried opening a portal to the warm frictiony space, and found herself looking into a room full of fluffy, multicolored clouds, perches everywhere, and windows. Lots and lots of disembodied windows, floating in the air.

Windows. Hmm. Space that was "rubbed" – maybe, space that was trafficked? Space that had other portals in it? Stable portals that Discord had built and maybe one of them led to him or maybe one of them led home? Yes! Twilight pranced through the portal triumphantly... and discovered that it sealed up behind her. Huh. She wondered if they always did that.

The clouds weren't clouds. She could tell because she wasn't a pegasus, but she could still sit on them. They lay on the ground, the walls and the ceiling, or floated in midair, some parallel to the ground, some perpendicular. There were also perches all over, rising up from the ground, sticking out of the wall, hanging from the ceiling. There were swings, and smooth but irregularly bumpy poles like polished, barkless tree branches. There were also empty popcorn boxes everywhere, and food spills on every available surface.

But the thing that drew Twilight's attention, once she got over the yuck factor of the sticky floor enough to actually look up, were the windows. There were windows looking out over Ponyville, and Cloudsdale, and Canterlot, Manehattan and Baltimare and the Everfree Forest, and a lot of places Twilight didn't recognize. There were windows looking out over mountain vistas where full-grown dragons wheeled in the air, and windows looking out over cold, frozen lands. Many of the windows showed creatures she didn't think existed anywhere on Earth, strange monkey-like bipeds with manes but no coats, wearing clothing, doing things like getting into carriages that seemed to pull themselves with magic, or going into tall buildings like the ones in Manehattan, or arguing with each other. There was also a window showing a cold lunar vista like the kind she had seen in paintings Princess Luna had done, with the Earth rising on a black horizon in the distance. Some other windows, Twilight deliberately did not give more than a single swift glance to before determining that whatever it was they were looking in on, she didn't want to see it. While this chaos world she was exploring was playing fast and loose with many of the laws of physics, at least angles were shaped correctly and space didn't seem to be doing things like overlapping itself.

All of the windows were silent. She tapped one with her hoof, one looking into Canterlot Palace, and jumped back when sound emerged from it. It was viewing Princess Celestia's audience chamber, and she was apparently having her usual daily court session. Somepony was going on and on about how she wanted there to be a law to keep foals safe from 'those creatures'. Princess Celestia's expression was full-on ceramic smile, none of the usual sincerity or warmth she had in her face. Whatever it was this mare wanted, it was actually making the Princess angry. Twilight had never seen that ceramic, empty mask directed at her – there was always real emotion and warmth in Princess Celestia's face for her, even when she was angry or frightened – but she'd seen enough court sessions to know what that meant.

"Princess! Princess Celestia! Can you hear me?" she shouted at the window, but suspected it wasn't going to work even as she tried it. Neither Celestia nor the guards nor any of the ponies in the audience chamber turned around or even flicked their ears. Of course Discord would want the freedom to chortle at the goings-on and make fun of ponies without any of them being able to hear him; the windows had to be one-way only.

But something unexpected happened. One of the other windows was looking out at the counter of an empty Sugarcube Corner, with Pinkie Pie doing something with the display to rearrange the cakes, and no customers present. Pinkie hopped up over the counter and yelled, "Hiiii, Twilight! Is that you?"

Twilight jumped, startled. The window with Sugarcube Corner was close to the Canterlot window, floating just a head or two away from it and not significantly higher than it either. "Pinkie?"

Pinkie bounded up to the window – which had to be impossible, those "windows" had to be invisible warps in space because one of them was overlooking her library, empty and dark because she wasn't in it, and if there had been anything visible to eyes or magic she would have seen it, but Pinkie obviously knew exactly where the window was because she somehow managed to press her muzzle against it, peering in. "Twilight, you silly, what are you doing in Discord's house?"

"Pinkie, how can you hear me?"

"I guess 'cause you're being loud! I heard you calling Princess Celestia. She's not at Discord's house with you, is she?"

"No, she's at court. Wait a minute, what time is it? How is Princess Celestia at court?"

"Well, the sun came up an hour ago, so it's court time, I guess. We just finished the morning breakfast rush and now it's gonna be kind of dead for a while until the shops open and then we'll get the second big rush!"

I've been wandering around Discord's dimension all night? It hadn't felt that long; maybe there was some sort of temporal distortion going on, too. Or maybe, judging from the growling in her stomach, it really had taken her that long to get here. "Discord's been stealing my books, Pinkie. I traced the teleport back to its source when he grabbed the books, and I ended up in some kind of... I don't know how to describe it except a closet dimension. Like he had huge piles of books, and clothes, and big disorganized piles of all kinds of junk."

Pinkie's eyes went huge. "You actually went to manespace? Wow!"

"Um..." Twilight had no idea how to handle that question, so she ignored it. "Anyway, I eventually found my way to this room full of weird windows, one of which was looking at Princess Celestia's court, and another was looking at you. You can see the window?"

"Sure! Can't you?"

"Well, I can from here, but I don't think I'd be able to see it from the other side..."

"You just have to squint your eyes just right! Like this!" Pinkie said, squinting. "So have you found Discord yet?"

"No, and it's getting really frustrating! I've been at this all night!"

"Why don't you come home and we can have Fluttershy call him for you and then she can help you yell at him?"

"How can Fluttershy – wait, did he give her some special way to contact him besides the summoning spell?"

"There's a summoning spell?"

"Yeah, but we'd have to use it with the Elements to actually summon him; if I just cast it without the Elements, it's like knocking on his door, but he doesn't have to answer. Princess Celestia taught it to me after Fluttershy reformed him."

"Well, I think he gave Fluttershy a way to contact him but I don't know what it is but maybe it's just that he visits her a lot because she talks like she can see him any time she wants to but maybe that just means she sees him a lot?"

"I don't think I can come home so easily anyway. Even though I can see you, I can't – I can't map out the connection between where I am and where you are so I can safely teleport."

"You don't need to teleport! Just climb through the window, silly filly!"

Twilight had learned enough trust in Pinkie's ridiculous ideas that she actually tried. "There's a barrier, Pinkie. I can't get through the window."

"Oh, right, of course, it's a closed window! Lemme see if I can get it open from this side!"

What followed was the spectacle of Pinkie trying for several minutes to lift nothing from the bottom of the window, slide nothing from the side of the window, push nothing down from the top of the window, and push and pull at nothing from the middle of the window. She was plainly miming the movements it would take to open a window without being able to see how the window actually opened. Twilight tried feeling around the edges of the window with magic and with her hooves, but couldn't find anything that might indicate an opening mechanism, even a magical one.

She sighed, finally. Pinkie, panting and sweating out of proportion to the physical effort she'd actually been demonstrating, was still struggling to "open" the window. "Never mind, Pinkie," she said. "I don't think Discord made it so it could be opened."

Pinkie sagged. "Sorry, Twilight, I tried really hard but I think you're right, I just can't get it open." Her ears drooped, then perked up. "But maybe I can get some-thing to go through, even if some-pony can't!" Before Twilight could figure out what she was talking about, she bounced over to the counter and grabbed a cupcake.

"Pinkie, I don't think that will—" Pinkie put her hoof through the window, holding the cupcake, as if the window wasn't even there. On Twilight's side, the cupcake appeared to be floating in air right in front of the window, with no sign of Pinkie's hoof. "Pinkie, are you ok? I can't see your hoof!"

"Yeah, I'm really stretching! Take it, Twilight, I can't keep stretching like this!"

Twilight took the cupcake. "How can you get a thing through but not a pony? Portals don't work that way! Either it lets something through or it doesn't, but it's like a doorway that's either open or shut!"

"That's a portal. This is a window. Big difference!"

Note to self: Pinkie seems to have a more intuitive understanding of how Discord's chaos magic works than I do. Figure out how! Somehow. "If you can push things through... I'm really grateful for the cupcake, Pinkie, because I'm kind of starving here, I've been wandering around this place all night... but I ran into a room made of pudding before, so the only thing I have had to eat was really sugary. I don't suppose you have anything you can give me that isn't full of sugar? Even just some hay or something."

"Oh, I've got just the thing!" Pinkie bounced back over to the counter, pulled a pie out from the display, and came back. "This is a savory mushroom potato pie we made for the lunch rush, but there's enough time before lunch to make another one, so you can have it and I'll just ring it up as I bought it!"

"I don't want to put you out or cost you a lot of bits—"

"Don't worry about it! You're on an important mission! The Cakes will understand! How are Pumpkin and Pound ever going to learn to read if Discord steals all the books from the library?"

It seemed highly unlikely to Twilight, now that she'd seen Discord's giant book pile, that he would have any interest in stealing books for pre-literate foals, but on the other hand, it was an important mission to recover Ponyville's library books and she was glad somepony was acknowledging that. Besides, she was really, really hungry. The cupcake made her mouth water, but she knew better than to eat a cupcake if there was a more solidly meal-like option available. "I only really need a slice or two of pie, I don't need the whole thing."

"Take it anyway, it's easier to push a whole thing through a window than a part of a thing!"

Bemused, Twilight took the pie when Pinkie pushed it through the window. How did that even make sense?

"Do you want me to tell Fluttershy to tell Discord that he better get you out of there and also return all the books?"

For a moment the thought was tempting; her primary strategy for getting home, so far, had been to find Discord and demand he do it, and Fluttershy admittedly had better leverage over him than Twilight did. On the other hand, needing to be rescued by her friends' intervention, when she was still so angry at Discord and wanted so badly to give him a piece of her mind directly, didn't sit well with her. She'd much rather find Discord and harangue him into taking her home than depend on Fluttershy's sweetness and kindness... it wasn't that Fluttershy's strategy wasn't dependable, it was that Twilight really didn't feel like being sweet and kind with Discord, or relying on anyone else to be.

"Give me another day to find Discord and give him a piece of my mind, and if I'm not back by tomorrow, then have Fluttershy make him bring me back."

"Okie dokie lokie!"

"I'm going to go eat this great pie you gave me, and then I'm going to go find Discord. See you tomorrow at the latest, Pinkie!"

"See ya!" Pinkie bounced away and into the back, presumably to replace the mushroom pie, which turned out to be absolutely delicious. It had savory daffodil bulbs and cheddar cheese and all sorts of herbs and spices. Twilight ended up eating more than half of it. Well, she'd been burning a lot of magic here.

Now to resume the search for Discord.

Author's Note

Some of my artist ponifications are obvious, some are less so. More Curly Etcher is of course M. C. Escher, but Stone Magpie is a literal translation of the words "Pablo" and "Picasso", and Doll Savior is a literal translation of "Salvador" coupled with a phonetic ponification of Dali. "Jennifer Lint" is not a real artist and was just thrown in there as a joke.

I originally had the idea for Discord having weird titles before I'd really read much of any fanfic at all, but in my head, they were originally weird titles that were at least recognizable titles of leadership, like Grand High Poobah and Great Dalmuti. The total ridiculousness of these titles was inspired by Alex Warlorn's "Dark World", though I don't believe he ever has them explained (or if he has, I haven't read it.)

The Skalboggan is inspired by my son's toy, Ziffy:

He came up with the Skalboggan based on the Catbus from Totoro, though I am responsible for its name.

Art credits: Melted clocks and sun hatching from an egg are Dali. Endless staircase is Escher. Spinning ballerina comes from the popular gif on the internet where what direction she spins in is ambiguous. Vase that is two ponies' faces is the popular optical illusion of a vase and two faces. Stallion fighting lemons = Ronen Goldman's photo of a man fighting apples. Angular shape distorted painting of Discord = inspired by the works of Pablo Picasso. Island on the back of a fish = Windows 7 wallpaper of a city on the back of a turtle. Mare whose eyes have teeth = inspired by the Corinthian from Neil Gaiman's Sandman, but also came out of a discussion with my son (the same one that came up with the Skalboggan.) I think I made up the waterfall splashing upward and the endlessly repeating image of the mother, foal and teacup. Also the tiles that are either a pony or a landscape.

Turn Up The Signal, Wipe Out The Noise

It seemed unlikely that Discord had a window overlooking his own living quarters, since he lived alone as far as she knew, but she checked anyway. None of the windows showed Discord himself, and very few of them even showed anything that was recognizably his realm of chaos. She was close to giving up on using the windows, and going back to opening random portals, when she saw that the large kitchen she'd bypassed because surely Discord wouldn't have anything as normal-looking as a kitchen in his home, and more specifically the stack of plates in that kitchen, was being swarmed by... was that snakes with mouse heads? No, plainly it was lizards with mouse heads, because their long snaky bodies had short stubby legs. And they were eating the plates as well as the food on the plates.

Okay, that was probably part of the chaos realm. And unless Discord was so random that he had a kitchen full of dishes floating someplace in this dimension, with no one using it – which, she had to admit, was possible – then that was either his kitchen, or it belonged to some denizen of this realm that was relatively sapient, who might be able to direct her to Discord.

Now she had to solve the problem of opening the window. Nothing she'd done had opened the window to the outside world, the one that overlooked Sugarcube Corner, but if this was really a window to another location in the chaos realm... She tried opening the window as if it were a window, which of course didn't work, but she'd had to try it. Then she spent what seemed like at least 2 or 3 hours trying to attune her magic to the window and open a portal to the exact same location. By the time she successfully had one, the window room was littered with open portals to various places in the chaos realm, because she didn't actually know how to close any of them.

The mice-snake-lizard things seemed to be mostly done with their meal now. When Twilight came through the portal, the remaining few of them scattered.

This was indeed a kitchen. It was a large, open space, with a fireplace that roared with... water, splashing up from the firewood. Okay then. There was a pantry made of fine old oak that smelled like cheddar cheese. When she opened it, she saw the orange space she'd appeared in first, and floating a short distance in front of her was a loosely compacted double-sided pile of food items, most of them cans. Twilight reeled a can with a picture of tomatoes on it in with her telekinesis, and cast a spell to open the can. Hastily she tossed it back into the orange space within the pantry, since she couldn't find a garbage can. Why did Discord have a can full of green worms, and why had he labeled it as tomatoes? The question was rhetorical, of course; she knew why.

There was an open archway leading out of the kitchen into what appeared to be a glass tunnel. Twilight walked cautiously out onto it. Her footing seemed solid, but the tunnel was surrounded on all sides by the dark, swirling energies of the chaos realm. Glass walls seemed very fragile in comparison to that. Also, glass being a magical conductor rather than an insulator, albeit not as good a conductor as crystal – the amount of magic out there was absurd. This entire realm felt like there was enormous magical pressure, giving her a headache when she wasn't doing magic and a hornache when she was. What she was pushing through her horn was thicker, denser than the magic she was used to, and more energetic, and it took a lot more to hold it back. When she wasn't using it, though, the magic seeped into her personal mana pool, filling her to the point where she was restless, uncomfortable, occasionally even twitching with the need to use her magic, and the overload made her head pound. The effect was a lot less in the sealed buildings, like the window room or the kitchen, but here in the glass tunnel she could almost hear the magic itself whispering to her. Use us use us use us let us make let us dance let us free

She gritted her teeth. No. She was so angry at Discord for putting her through all this, but she was going to stay in control. She wasn't going to start ripping random portals in reality again.

The tunnel led to... she wasn't sure. Had it been triangular, she'd have called it a pyramid, like they had in Neighypt and Mexicaballo, but it wasn't a pyramid. It was... an icosahedron? An irregular icosahedron? An irregular icosahedron with the spikes of a star shape sticking out of it except none of them were aligned with each other? She saw it from above, first, and then the tunnel spiraled in a gentle ramp down to the middle of the thing. It was no kind of structure that could exist under gravity, unless maybe it was a cloud house... but it was made of solid brick, not clouds.

On the last bit of the tunnel, it sloped down dramatically, to the point where she couldn't see any way to walk down it, and narrowed so that she wouldn't be able to stand up straight in it anyway. It spiraled around several times more below her before finally entering the icosahedron-like thingy building. How was she supposed to get down there...?

Oh, wait. It was Discord. This was plainly a slide.

Tentatively, Twilight inched toward the slide. She could go down on her back, hind legs first, in which case there was a good chance of landing on her rump because her hind legs weren't good for establishing an initial purchase on something; she had a lot less dexterity with them. Or she could go down face first, and hopefully catch herself at the bottom with her forelegs and be able to come out of the slide on all fours, but if the slide came out too close to the floor she would faceplant. Eventually she decided that landing on her rump was safer than landing on her head, so she carefully braced herself with her forelegs at her side, from a sitting position, and inched her backside forward. Pinkie did this all the time. Slides wouldn't exist if pony anatomy couldn't handle them. Obviously she could do this.

Then her footing gave out, the slippery glass providing no purchase for her hooves or her magic, and she was slipping. Twilight screamed involuntarily. The tunnel seemed greased or lubricated somehow, so her descent was nearly frictionless, and terrifyingly fast. What was worse was that the topology of the slide was not the topology of the glass tunnel as she had seen it from above. When she'd been in the part she could walk through, the slide portion had been a simple spiral underneath her – a steep spiral, to be sure, but a regular, predictable one. Now that she was actually in the slide, it had upslopes that she went skidding up, hind legs first, which meant she was upside down, and some of them were far too steep for momentum to be carrying her. It wasn't a reversal of gravity, because she could still feel that the general pull of gravity was in the same direction; it was more that there was an upstream current so powerful that it carried her up, except a current of what? She was the only thing that seemed to be moving.

In a few other places, the gravity did rapidly alter, making her spin around the interior of the tunnel, except that because it was gravity altering it felt to her as if the tunnel was what was spinning, and the only reason she could tell otherwise was that the glass was still transparent and the icosahedron outside seemed to be spinning with the tunnel, which was probably less possible than that gravity was spinning. Then there was a portion where the tunnel went totally black, and she shrieked even louder. There were more upslopes, and more gravity switches, which were far more terrifying in complete darkness. The current of absolutely nothing that was carrying her made her slide rapidly from side to side so that even when gravity stayed in place she was still going halfway up the wall on one side of the slide, then across and halfway up the other wall, as her general motion forward continued.

And then there was light, and she was out and falling. Twilight shrieked again and scrabbled, instinctively trying to flap her forelegs because she didn't have wings, as she plunged... onto a very, very spongy, bouncy surface. She bounced once, twice, upside down, on her side, and finally came to rest many heads away from the slide exit. Oh, she was going to kill Discord when she found him.

She got to her hooves, panting, and took stock. She was in an enormous bouncy house. The top was easily twenty heads up. It was nearly impossible to walk on the surface normally, because it gave under her hooves and then snapped back, making her stumble. The only way to proceed seemed to be to bounce. Twilight had never been much of a bouncy pony, but she'd seen that Pinkie Pie almost never used any other form of locomotion, so she'd seen plenty of examples of it. Just push off, all legs at once, tilt forward with forelegs out, let hind legs come to rest behind them, then all legs again. It was like jumping, but with the surface being so springy, it took far less effort than jumping would normally.

Finally, finally, she was out of the bouncy house and in a corridor made of feathers. Or a corridor growing feathers, she wasn't sure which. The floor, and the wall when she touched it, had the exact consistency of a pegasus wing, except no bony edge; it was just all feathers. It was soft, and fluffy, and almost as hard to walk on normally as the bouncy house had been, and it was warm but with currents of a light breeze blowing through it, and in the center there was what looked like a hot tub, though when she tested the temperature it was more like a warm tub – the temperature you'd take a bath at, rather than the temperature of a soak at the spa. Also, the water in the tub was heavily salinated. There were, however, water fountains all along the walls, lovely things made of multicolored glass, perpetually jetting cold and delicious water in bow-shaped arcs. Being very thirsty, Twilight drank.

With her thirst quenched, she suddenly felt very tired; she'd been at this all night. The temptation to lie down on the soft feathered floor and take a nap was almost overwhelming. What kept her from doing so was the sound of voices, up ahead. Pony voices. Many, many pony voices.

Why would there be so many ponies in Discord's dimension?

As she moved forward, the distant sound of pony voices turned into a cacophony. Well, that might be an exaggeration brought on by her headache, but it sounded like a crowded school cafeteria, so many ponies talking at once. With magic almost browbeating her into using it, Twilight cast an eavesdropping spell, which would isolate each individual thread and cycle through them, amplifying one and muting the others, then shifting to a different one, one by one.

"For in a minute there are many days: o, by this count I shall be much in years ere I again behold my Romareo!"

"trade agreements with Griffonstone, largely centering on"

"and in his mouth he had... the brick!"

"Now this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madponies know nothing. But you should have seen me."

"crystal ponies were enslaved in the mines, digging for crystals. Sombra seemed to be looking for"

"sensitive initial conditions. Our first impression of another pony is crucial for"

"didn't know if she was ever going to get her cutie mark!"

"'contrary, my dear, I've already won!' Ahuizotl cackled. 'All I need'"

"mysterious nation of Neighpon, where dragons and ponies walk the same streets. We visited"

"She pushed him against the bed. 'Yes, I am,' she whispered seductively. 'But mares in heat choose our partners. And I've chosen'"

"before the killer would strike again. But she needed more evidence. She couldn't"

Being as widely read as she was, Twilight recognized almost all of these as lines from books. Was there some kind of book club here? But how could any pony make out what their neighbor was reading, in all of that babble?

She came out of the feather room onto a balcony and sucked in a quiet breath.

Before her there was a vast room, with architecture reminiscent of the structures of ancient Minos, or some of the current popular cloudhome architecture, though this was sculpted in marble rather than cloud. Different colors of marble were used almost everywhere, and there were pillars that seemed to be made of polished granite as well as marble pillars. The room was four stories tall, and she was on the third story. On each story, there were doorways all around the walls – many of them arches of various heights and widths, but there were also circles, standard rectangles, triangular doors, upside-down triangular doors, squares, trapezoids, and amorphous shapes that weren't easily defined as anything. Most of them were wide open, though all the ones she could see on the first floor were closed.

Each story seemed to be misaligned with the others, and of different irregular shapes, so not only didn't the doors line up with each other, the corners didn't either... and there was no consistency to the number of corners. It was beautiful and striking, but it made her head hurt as her brain frantically tried to find symmetry somewhere, anywhere, and came up with nothing.

Graceful fountains were placed in various locations on the courtyard-like lowest floor. Some of them had statues of creatures much like Discord except with four dragon-like limbs instead of just one, and smoother, shorter faces that seemed feminine, spouting water from their mouths. One fountain in particular was breathtaking and impossible. There was a glass sculpture of a phoenix in the center of the fountain, and the whole thing was made of red, orange and yellow glass, making the water itself seem to be on fire. The phoenix was in flight, as if bursting upward out of the water, and was somehow balanced into this position by sculpted droplets of water connected by threads of glass so fine Twilight could barely make them out. They reflected the fire-colored glass and the fire-colored water, looking like contrails of slender flame-colored of magic trailing behind the phoenix. Water ran up the sculpture and sprayed out as a mist of droplets from the phoenix's wings, creating a halo of flame-colored water all around the phoenix. That had to be Discord's doing – no pony had the ability to blatantly violate the laws of physics and make that violation permanent enough that it could support a sculpture. Well, no – teams of unicorns could do it. There were similar spells all over the foundation of Canterlot. But Twilight had never seen a pony put permanent gravity-defying spells on a work of art, and she herself wasn't sure she could do it. Support spells were one thing, but the water was flowing up. On the other hand, she wondered if Discord could really create something so beautiful and lifelike.

The sounds were coming from directly below. She peered over the edge of the balcony – and saw Discord, below her, floating on a cloud about halfway between the floor and the second story. He was reclining, but not looking up. All around him, books floated. One that seemed to be floating directly in his line of vision had tiny ponies in old-time garb walking around and posturing on the surface of the book... wait, were they having a swordfight? She was too high up to make it out properly. Discord was resting a large, dripping hayburger with at least three patties on one of the open books next to his arm, as he munched pickles out of a floating pickle jar. Except for the book with the tiny ponies fighting on it and the book with the hayburger, all the books floated around aimlessly, but with a general vaguely circular motion around Discord, like an orbiting cloud. A book floated under Discord's chin, and she saw with horror that pickle juice was dripping all over it.

The cacophony of conversation came from the books; they were reading themselves. Except for the one book that seemed to be enacting a play. She remembered the first snippet she'd heard. Yes, that could be Spear Shaker's Romareo and Julienne down there, the story of a noble unicorn colt and a filly from a rich and powerful clan of earth pony potato farmers who fell in love despite their families being locked in mortal enmity. And the tiny ponies enacting the play were actually hurting each other... there was blood spilling onto the book. One of the books Discord had actually returned had been the first volume of Collected Plays of Spear Shaker, and it had had blood on it too. Was he now engaged in destroying the second volume?

There was no clearly obvious way of getting down there and confronting him, and if she shouted, Twilight wasn't sure he could hear her over the babble of the books. She wasn't actually sure how he was managing to make out any individual book in the din, in the first place. After a few moments of thought, Twilight mentally facehoofed, realizing that the answer was not only obvious, but that if she'd thought of it earlier she wouldn't have gotten frustrated enough to start ripping holes in space. She cast the temporary wings spell on herself, the one she'd used on Rarity for the Best Young Flyers competition. Oddly, while Rarity's wings had come out as gorgeous, glittering butterfly wings, hers took the shape of perfectly normal pegasus wings, purple like the rest of her, just more ghostly and transparent than real pegasus wings would have been. In the polished marble of the floor she was standing on, she looked like an alicorn. Twilight giggled at the silliness of imagining herself as a princess, but her mirth was instantly cut short by the sight of a piece of pickle falling on a floating book. All of the rage she'd been feeling at Discord came back.

She jumped down, flapping her temporary wings. The spell granted rudimentary knowledge of how to fly along with the wings; she wouldn't be doing Rainbow Dash-style stunts, but she could fly at least as competently as Fluttershy. Discord didn't even notice her until she was practically on top of him. "Discord!" she shouted down to him, over the babble of the books.

Discord's head jerked up. With an expression of startlement that almost rivaled the one he'd made when he'd realized the Elements were actually working, he said, "Twilight?" The books went silent and scattered, hiding in the cloud he was laying on. "What are you doing here?"

"Give back my books. Now," she growled.

"Your books? Twilight, I am fairly certain that the majority of these are library books, not your personal possessions," he said. "Not all of them even come from your library."

"You. Stole books from my library. Destroyed—"

"How do you steal books from a library?" Discord interrupted. "I borrowed them. Isn't that what you do with a library?"

She took deep breaths. Despite her fantasies, she didn't want to actually punch him in the face, and she was getting very close to the point where she wasn't sure she could control herself. "You borrow books from a library by checking them out. That way the librarian knows they're gone, and where they are. And can send you overdue notices if you've had them out too long. And can make you pay for them when you destroy them!"

"I haven't destroyed any books," Discord said, sounding bewildered.

"Oh, really?" Twilight flew closer to him, darting at his face. Discord actually leaned his head back to avoid her – like backing up, except with just his neck. "What about the cookie crumbs? The water damage? The soap? The BLOODSTAINS?!" On the last, she yanked the books he'd been hiding in the cloud out, and shoved Collected Plays of Spear Shaker, Vol 2 in his face. Discord teleported away and appeared in the air a short distance from her.

"Pish-posh, Twilight. I know for a fact that all of those books are still readable."

"Fear and Loathing in Las Pegasus was warped badly and half the pages are stuck together!"

"All right, all of the books are still readable except that one, but really, do you want impressionable young ponies to be reading an account of a so-called journalist and his so-called lawyer spending an entire weekend on powerful hallucinogenic potions and mood-altering spells? It's quite irresponsible of you to even have that book in the library in Ponyville where any young foal could come along and read it."

"That's not acceptable!" Twilight flung all of the books at him. Discord teleported out of the way, and reappeared, chuckling.

"Oh, my. Aren't you ever riled up. And to think I accomplished this masterpiece of disharmony without even trying!" She threw the books at him again. He dodged physically this time, until she brought them back around for a second pass, and then he teleported. "You are so adorable when you're angry! Here, I need to take a picture of this." Suddenly he was off to the side, with a camera. He snapped a shot, but that kept him in place long enough that she could hit him in the head with Collected Plays, which was physically the largest book there. "Twilight, Twilight, do you – do you seriously think you can hurt me? By throwing books at me?" He started laughing riotously. "You are hilarious!" Discord snapped his talon, and all of the books turned into birds, which flew away, croaking like frogs. Twilight's eyes widened with renewed rage. "And really, you can't be all that concerned for the welfare of your books if you're going to damage them yourself by throwing them at me."

"You just destroyed a dozen books," Twilight said softly.

"But I created a dozen birds! And really, in the grand scheme of things, what's more valuable? The life of a precious little animal or the existence of another printed paper copy of a book with a million other copies? I know which one Fluttershy would prefer."

Her vision was hazed in red, her heart pounding so hard she could feel it bruising itself against her ribcage. All she could think about was wiping that smug smile off Discord's face. With a thought, Twilight tore open a portal to the place that had been full of water the last time she opened a portal to it, directly over Discord. A veritable wall of water dropped out of nowhere and slammed into the draconequus, sluicing down and hiding him from sight.

Discord reappeared, drenched, with a snake-like fish twined in his antler. "All right, I'll acknowledge that was a good—"

She tore open another random portal. This time a large assortment of jars containing what might be food substances rained down on his head. Many of them proceeded to smash on the floor afterward.

The jars that hadn't broken floated upward, away from Discord, who was actually visibly bruised in several spots. There was even a trickle of blood on his neck. "Twilight, this is getting tedi—"

Twilight ripped multiple holes in the reality of the chaos realm at once. A jet of lava spurted out at Discord, who narrowly avoided it by dodging into a gale-force wind that flung him across the room. Various shower curtains tumbled out of another hole, and she used these to wrap Discord tightly while he was still recovering from the intense wind. Discord thrashed, tearing at the shower curtains with his claws. Before he'd freed himself, Twilight grabbed him and threw him into what was still a cascade of water pouring down. Most of her portals weren't doing much of anything – there was either nothing beyond them but space, or there was no pressure driving anything to fall out of the portal – but she ripped another, and another. The entire first floor of the room was now covered with water, since all the doors on the first floor appeared to be shut.

Discord materialized, a furious expression on his face. He was no longer wet, bruised or covered with shower curtains. Twilight had been expecting this, and had already grabbed all the objects that had thus far fallen out of portals – shower curtains, jars, broken jars, loaves of bread, a pile of black rocks that seemed to absorb the color of whatever they touched, a large number of live fish, and a great deal of water. She threw all of them at him from behind, so he didn't see them coming, and then teleported herself to get out of the way.

The pressure in her head was gone. The ache in her horn had gone away; the viscousness of the magic she was drawing on had thinned, and it was flowing out of her horn with a feeling more satisfying than any use of magic she'd felt before – like the almost painful satisfaction of peeing when your bladder was full to bursting. Every spell she cast seemed to be easier. She was alive with righteous rage, blood burning with the need to batter Discord into a bloody pulp and the joy of feeling her attacks hit him. The various things she'd collected as weapons were spinning in a few separate waterspouts, that seemed almost to be animating themselves now that she'd gotten them started, and she added to them as she pulled open more holes in space and yanked more objects in. Everything she'd been through – the stress and fear of discovering the books missing, her anger and heartbreak at seeing them damaged, the frustration and sleeplessness she'd endured of over a day searching through this place that made no sense, for Discord – all of it was pouring through her, the stress unraveling as she used the pent-up energy of her emotions to fuel her attacks on the one responsible. When Discord reappeared, she hit him with a waterspout, with cans and jars and an entire wardrobe of clothing rotating through it.

He was suddenly behind her. "TWILIGHT! YOU HAVE TO STOP THIS NOW, OR—"

"Or what?" Twilight turned to face him and laughed, teleporting one of her waterspouts so its bottom touched down on his head. With a yowl, Discord was yanked back into the waterspout, this one featuring black rocks and the shower curtains.

All of her waterspouts broke apart, the water and the objects within falling to the floor below. "Twilight, listen to me!" Discord shouted. He was bedraggled and wet, bruised again, but he looked less angry than... worried? Had she ever seen Discord looking? "Chaos amplifies emotion! If you're—"

She ripped open a portal and watched as some sort of suction pulled him in, flailing. The water below stirred in the strong wind created by the suction portal. She couldn't afford to have it suck all the air out, so she opened a second one to the very windy area.

Discord reappeared above her. "Twilight, you have to calm down! Chaos amplifies emotion, emotion amplifies magic, and magic amplifies chaos! You're in a feedback loop that will burn you out!"

That was ridiculous. She'd never felt stronger. "You just want me to spare you your punishment for stealing my books! Well, it's not going to work!" He had a shield up. She blasted the shield directly, varying the frequency of her magic rapidly to find a weak point, like Shining had taught her when she'd practiced against him. Discord's shield was varying its own frequency rapidly, but they weren't in sync; it took only a second before her magic found a frequency his shield was currently weak against, and shattered it, blasting him across the room. He slammed into the wall and slid slowly down it for a moment before vanishing.

"Now where are you?" She couldn't sense him re-entering. Space roiled and churned with the number of portals she'd torn open. Twilight spun in place, eyes wide, looking for any sign of Discord's return.

A shower curtain suddenly appeared directly in front of her and wrapped around her head. A blast of magic shredded it almost instantly, but more shower curtains attacked her. Tomatoes and berries and other soft fruit pelted her. Half-melted ice cream rained down on her in glops. Twilight sent the ice cream out, fully melted, in a wave of misty droplets, that just for a moment outlined the shape of half a draconequus at the edge of the ice cream cloud. Ha! She blasted him with downward kinetic force, throwing him with all her might into the water below, while at the same time pulling every object within the water toward him with great force.

And then she felt something clamp onto her horn, and her magic redirected upward, blasting at the ceiling. She reached toward the whatever it was with her hooves. It was a metal cone, bigger than her horn, that was fastened tightly to the base where her horn met her head. It opened outward, like a dog's cone of shame, and she couldn't make her magic point in any direction but straight. When she tried to cast a spell to destroy the cone, her spell dissolved into pure kinetic magical force, a release of telekinesis rather than actual spellwork.

Abruptly there was a paw on her chin, a talon in her mane, and a weight on her back. Twilight thrashed and bucked, but couldn't dislodge Discord or keep him from holding her head in place, so that all her magic was shooting straight up into the hole she'd already made in the roof. "Twilight, you have to calm down." She could feel his breath against her ear. "I will not be responsible for trying to explain to Celestia that her favorite student burned herself out or fell to dark magic because she was mad at me for not returning books. Nopony would ever believe me. You have to stop using magic!"

"No—" Twilight thrashed harder. "I—DON'T!"

And the cone overloaded, exploding off her head. She felt Discord's weight disappear a split second before her second blast would have vaporized him, too.

Her vision swam and her heart was pounding and yet she felt good. Oh, how she was going to make Discord pay. Pay and pay and pay, for everything.

A tiny voice just by her ear. "You're in the chaos realm, Twilight. It's destabilizing you, and you're returning the favor! Trust me, you do not want—"

She cast a bug zapper spell over herself, and shivered uncontrollably as ghostly almost-shocks danced over her coat, zapping any unfortunate life forms that happened to be on her. Then for good measure she swatted at where tiny Discord had just been, but her hoof didn't contact anything.

"All right, all right!" His voice seemed to be coming from everywhere now. "I'll return the books I took, I'll clean them up, I'll buy you a new copy of Fear and Loathing! Just stop using your magic and calm down!"

"Not before I make you pay!" she screamed, and started blasting everywhere, firing attack after attack.

Most of the room around her was rubble floating in water now. Still no sign of Discord. "Where are you little chaos spirit?" she caroled, grinning madly. "Come out, come out, wherever you are! I know you like to—" Out of the corner of her eye she saw Discord, and fired at him. "--play!"

And then the world turned upside down, and an Equestria Games-sized swimming pool's quantity of water fell on her, bearing her down. She shrieked, beating her wings frantically, and then there was no air to scream, nothing but the struggle to stay airborne. Just as she was bursting upward out of the mass of water – and noticing that despite the gravity inversion, all of the rubble and other hard solid objects were still sticking to what had originally been the floor – the gravity went sideways, and she fell, her wings not oriented properly for flight against gravity in that direction. Before she could right herself, the water that was now all piled up against a side wall toppled over in a tsunami, catching her and dragging her under.

In panic and fury, Twilight lit up her horn once more with a heat spell, and put so much power into it that the cold water she was drowning in flash-vaporized.

Now she was dizzy, and her waterlogged spell-created wings didn't have the resistance to water that real pegasus wings did, and her horn hurt. A lot, actually. Actually, more than a lot. She sucked in a breath, trying not to scream as the pain sank in... and saw dead, flash-cooked fish all around her.

I did that. Fish that would never move or swim again. I did that. There had to be over a hundred of them. I did that. She'd dragged them out of their home by opening a portal within whatever body of water they'd lived in, and then she'd boiled them alive, instantly. I killed them. I killed them all.

Her head swam. In a panic she looked around for Discord. Had she hurt him? Could she have – no, no, if Discord could be killed surely somepony would have done it already.

She looked up. All her portals were gone, and Discord floated in the air above her, unharmed, the bruises and cuts she'd inflicted on him before gone once again. "Are you done now?" he said mildly.

She looked back down, hoping it had all been an illusion, but no. She was still surrounded by the fish she had killed. Twilight collapsed to her knees and wailed. What had she done? How many fish had she killed? Had there been other living creatures in the water as well? What if there had been ponies? Or the Skalboggan? Or anything?

Discord descended and landed next to her. "I don't know how you got here," he said. "But I'm guessing Celestia never warned you of the dangers of overusing magic in the realm of chaos?"

She shook her head, miserably. "I killed them... I killed all those fish... just because I was angry about library books!"

"Oh, so it's the fish you're upset about and not the fact that you repeatedly tried to kill me?"

"I – I wasn't trying to kill you," she said, pressing her hooves to her face and trying to hold back her sobs. "I just... I was so angry..."

"If I'd been a pony I'd be dead," said Discord. He knelt down in front of her, balanced on his haunches. "At least, if I'd been a pony who wasn't Celestia or Luna. And I'm not sure Luna could have stood up to that barrage, honestly. Though Luna would probably have killed you in self defense."

"I don't understand," Twilight sobbed. "I was angry before but I just... I just wanted to yell at you. To make you give the books back. But then... I got so angry that I wanted to hurt you, and I just kept getting angrier and angrier, and every time I hit you it felt good... that's horrible. I'm horrible. What kind of pony..."

"The kind who started using magic in anger in the realm of chaos, and is powerful enough to channel the magic here," Discord said dryly. "You may have noticed how much more raw magic is available to you here?"

Twilight nodded, trying to keep herself from bawling.

"Most unicorns couldn't cast much here. Magic is too dense. They'd start hurting themselves, quickly, and they'd stop." He stood up. "You have the capacity to channel chaos magic, Twilight. Congratulations."

"But I was so angry. Why was I so angry?..."

Discord sighed. "Chaos magic isn't dark magic, but they share similarities," he said, floating behind her so she had to pivot to follow him. "Dark magic feeds on negative emotion. The more negative emotion you pour into it, the stronger it gets. The stronger it gets, the more it heightens your negative emotions. Chaos doesn't care whether your emotions are positive or negative; all it cares about is that they're strong. But it'll do the same thing. The more emotion you pour in, the more chaos magic you can channel. The more chaos magic you're channeling, the more intense and irrational your emotions become."

"But that doesn't happen to you..."

His grin was bitter and wry. "Twilight, it happens to me all the time. It's my entire life. But I was born for it. I have a personality suited for it. I grew up with chaos. You didn't. In Equestria, you don't have enough of an affinity for chaos, and there's so much harmonic magic everywhere, that's what you'll naturally draw on." Discord picked her up with his tail and gestured expansively outward. "But there is no harmonic magic in the realm of chaos. There's no Tree of Harmony, no Crystal Heart, nothing here to help you harmonize and control your magic. There's nothing here but chaos magic, at a much higher magical density than in Equestria. It could have driven you insane." He set her down, and touched her horn gently with a single furred digit. She whimpered. "You nearly burnt out your horn with that last stunt."

"It hurts," she admitted, fighting not to start sobbing again. Part of her wondered why he'd said Tree of Harmony, not Elements, but the rest of her was too occupied with the pain in her horn to care.

"It's going to hurt. I don't have a horn myself, but I saw Celestia do this to herself once. She was laid up in bed for a week, and couldn't cast spells for two months."

"Two months?" Twilight wailed.

"Oh, relax. You're not hurt nearly as badly as she was."

"But she's an alicorn! They heal—"

"That wasn't a factor, trust me. You'll need to see a doctor in Canterlot, one of the ones who specializes in horn injuries."

"A cerologist?"

"Yes, that. But my guess is, you'll be fine in a few days. Just stop using magic." He held out a small velvet-lined but otherwise empty box toward her. "Now that you aren't going to blow your own head up from the pressure if I block your ability to cast, I could take your horn for a few days and hold it in safekeeping until it heals. That way you wouldn't accidentally hurt yourself by using telekinesis."

"No," she said. Shaking her head turned out to be painful. "Thank you, but no. But why do you care? I was trying to hurt you..."

He smiled thinly. "Because chaos is mine, and I don't like seeing unicorns drive themselves insane or hurt themselves trying to use it. And, well, I admit I might have provoked you just a teeny bit. Though in my defense..." Now he looked genuinely puzzled. "You check books out of libraries? What does that even mean? I just always used to take them, and put them back when I was done."

"What kind of library would let anypony do that? Or did they just let you get away with it because you're Discord and nopony could stop you?"

Discord grinned. "I'll admit, nopony could have stopped me, but no, that was... just how the library worked. It wasn't a public library, though. Perhaps that's the difference."

This was familiar, safe ground, not like talking about her temper tantrum or the violence she'd committed. "Well, libraries today, public libraries, you have to bring the books you want to the librarian and have her mark down that you took them. And you have to return them in three weeks, or request a renewal, and you can't get indefinite renewals unless you have a dispensation from the Crown. And you're not allowed to take out 300 at once!"

"Why not?"

"Because! Other ponies have the right to take out those books, too! If you take out 300 at once, that's far too many. Nopony can read 300 books in three weeks. I know, I've tried."

"I'll bet I could," Discord said.

"Well, if you always read twelve books at once, maybe, but... why do you even do that? How can you even understand all those books? And how does that audio conversion spell work? I've used audio conversion spells before, but they don't sound like natural conversation and they mispronounce a lot of the words..."

"It works because it does," Discord said. "After today's incident, I am even less inclined to show you the inner workings of a chaos spell than before. And I can understand all those books because I'm Discord, how else?" He grinned.

"But why did you even want so many books? I saw all the library books you had in that... orange place? It was huge. You must have had like two thousand books there or something."

Discord shrugged. "I never counted them."

"That doesn't answer the question."

"Don't you have at least two thousand books?"

Twilight sighed. "Everypony knows I love to read. But you've never shown any interest in reading. Why would you have stolen two thousand books from libraries if it wasn't just to be a jerk?"

Discord looked away. "Does it really matter all that much?"

"Yes, it matters! If you want me to believe you that you didn't even know you need to take out books—"

"Has it ever occurred to you that I spent over a thousand years in stone?" Discord snapped. "I could hear, I could walk in dreams, I could follow traces of magic to observe things that were happening, if by 'observe' I mean 'sense the flow of magic and emotion and nothing else'. Good comedy, if nothing else, demands that I be au courant with the times. So I've been using books to catch up with the modern age, so what? Isn't that what they're for? Is it so astonishing to imagine I would want to know things that happened while I was imprisoned? Luna talks like everypony did a thousand years ago, and no one questions why she would want to learn more about what's going on nowadays, but simply because I managed to pick up the lingo as it evolved because the only sense left to me was hearing, you assume I don't need to catch up?"

"Then why didn't you come to me and ask? I could have helped you—"

"Ask?" Discord chuckled harshly. "Nopony but Fluttershy has ever done anything for me just because I asked. Not in two thousand years, anyway. They'll do things I tell them to, if they're afraid of the consequences if they don't, but they won't just do something because I asked."

"Well, fine, but you could have come into the library during regular hours and browsed to find what you want—"

"Without all the patrons running out the door and screaming?"

"During workdays we hardly have anypony come in at all. You could easily have come in at a time nopony else was there and just read the books there in the library, or checked them out in reasonable quantities. You didn't have to hide—"

"Yes, I did!" he snapped. "You can't possibly understand—"

"What? That you're embarrassed to be seen reading? I don't like that when it comes from Rainbow Dash, and I'm not going to take it from you – not now that I know you've taken over two thousand books out of different libraries! I don't—"

"I can't read." His voice was sharp and uncharacteristically clipped, biting out the words.

The sentence stopped Twilight's rant cold. She stared at him. "Wh – what?"

"Oh, if I struggle with it, I can eventually make it out." He paced, gesturing. "I can read Fluttershy's letters; they're short and easy, and her hoofwriting doesn't confuse me for some reason. But I can't read a whole book. I can't stand there and browse, reading the back and flipping through a book to see if I want it. I can't sit in a library and read." Discord turned and glared at her. "Because I can read faster than any pony alive, including you, but only because I have a spell that reads to me and the ability to understand dozens of different conversations at once. And that's not good enough for you ponies. You're going to treat me like I'm less than you, as if I'm less intelligent when I've been alive for thousands of years and I've been to more other worlds than I can count and I can travel in time and I can walk under the light of alien stars but no, my eyeballs cannot make sense out of the squiggles you ponies call letters without my putting great effort into it, so that makes me inferior to you."

He poked at her, his talon not quite hitting her in the eye. She flinched. "No. I'm not putting up with it," he said, anger in his voice. "You'd throw me out of the library for trying to read ten books at once because you'd complain that libraries are supposed to be quiet."

Twilight stared at him. "You have dyslexia?"

"I'm not currently involved in a passionate romance with Princess Celestia, no." He smirked.

"What – I – never mind, I don't even want to know where that came from. Do you know what dyslexia is?"

"If it's not about my romantic adventuries with Princess Celestia, then... it sounds vaguely like I'm supposed to be dating a bald coatless monkey who's on a one-being crusade to save his planet from a superpowerful alien?"

"I have no idea where you are even going with these jokes, but I don't care. Dyslexia is a condition in a pony's brain that makes it difficult for them to understand writing, but it doesn't have any other effect on their intelligence. They just discovered it within the last century. Before that, foals with the condition were just considered to be stupid, but some great inventors in Equestria's history had it, so it's got nothing to do with how smart you are. Once they realized it was specifically an inability to read written language easily, they were able to come up with ways to help foals with the condition get a full education, without being hampered by their disability."

Discord stared at her. "I always just thought it was because of Chaos."

"But that doesn't make sense; spoken language is much more complicated and difficult to understand than written language. Anypony trying to learn a second language will have an easier time with the written form than the spoken form, unless they're a foal because foals are optimized to learn languages. If Chaos prevented you from processing symbolic representations of sounds or ideas, then you wouldn't be able to talk."

"I... had some issues with that, too... though there might have been other reasons."

"Well, you can talk perfectly well now, and I've heard you speak words from other languages, so I'm guessing maybe you know more than just Equestrian. I strongly doubt your problem with reading has to do with being the spirit of Chaos. Heck, given the collision between unicorn writing and hoofwriting still hasn't sorted itself out, written Equestrian is a lot more chaotic than the spoken language is."

"Ponies have this problem?"

"Sure. Mostly you don't see it with the adults, because our educational system adapted and we work harder to teach the foals with dyslexia so that by the time they're adults, they might read slowly and their spelling might not be great, but they can read without magical assistance like the kind you're using. But there are adults who occasionally didn't get that training, and there are programs to teach them as well, so they can improve their reading abilities. Of course, since you've found a way to take your magic and an ability that you have that ponies don't and use them to read faster than ponies can, maybe you don't really need any help, but... if you want help, we could try one of the educational programs for adult dyslexics and see if it helps you."

He continued to stare at her for a moment, and then chuckled, shaking his head. "You just destroyed my home, ruined my entire collection of shower curtains, killed my entire fish pond, smashed jars of food that have been in my pantry for over a thousand years, and tried to kill me, over damaged library books... and now you're offering to help me learn to read better?" Discord twanged her horn – which didn't hurt, as it was suddenly rubbery and gave under his talon with a bounce, and while it was rubbery the pain she'd felt before was gone. Then her horn was normal again, and the pain came back. "Sometimes you're more absurd than even I could imagine, Twilight."

"I – I'm sorry." She looked away. "I – yes, I was really mad at you, and I had every intention of chewing your head off metaphorically, but somehow... somehow I got so mad that I actually wanted to hurt you. I know you say that was the chaos amplifying my emotions, but I still feel like I should have been able to keep it under control better."

"But of course you couldn't. If you don't know something is affecting your mind, you have no reason to try to keep it under control." He was suddenly dressed in a martial arts gi, a cotton headband around his forehead with Neighponese characters on it. Twilight herself was dressed in a similar costume, though she had a white belt tied around her waist, and Discord's was a riotous, loud plaid made of clashing bright colors. "If you would learn the ways of chaos, young student, you must first remember that all emotion is chaos, and chaos is emotion. Control your emotion, and you cannot control chaos. Do not control your emotion, and chaos will control you. You must exist in the space between controlling and not controlling, to master chaos."

"I wasn't actually out to learn to master chaos. I just wanted you to give me my books back. All the library books you took, from all the libraries."

"For someone who wasn't trying to master chaos you've gotten off to a great start." The costumes were gone. "I'm amazed you got here in the first place, and even more astonished at that lovely, lovely chaos you caused when you started ripping portals open willy-nilly. Mind you, don't try this at home. The dimension you live in is much less resilient to the stress of spatial portals all over the place than the chaos realm is."

"Didn't you say I was destabilizing your dimension, though?"

Discord waved a paw. "Piffle. Chaos isn't stable in the first place. What you were destabilizing was the pockets of stability I'd set up, because I like to have living creatures around the place, and a stash of food for when I forget exactly what snozzberries taste like so I can't conjure up any for myself, and things like that, so I do maintain stable pockets here and there in order to have those things. The dimension wouldn't have been harmed at all, no matter how many holes you put in it. The things I've made, however, can be wrecked – as can the things I've been keeping here, considering that that's exactly what you just did to a good number of them." He sighed mournfully. "I'll never be able to replace some of those shower curtains."

"...Why do you collect shower curtains?"

He waggled his tail at her, from a reclining position in mid-air. "They don't call me a dracon-equus for nothing, Twilight. I've got to hoard something, and gold and jewels are just so jejune and overdone."

That didn't actually explain anything, but she let it pass. "I'm sorry I wrecked your house," she said. "I wasn't – I mean, I didn't come here planning to do that."

"Ah, no harm done. I probably would have wrecked it myself in a week or two; I confess I am passionate about redecorating."

"What about that—" Her eyes fell on the remains of the glass phoenix statue, the one she'd been just about to ask him if he intended to save when he redecorated. It was nothing but large shards, now. "Ohhh...."

"Is something the matter?"

"That beautiful statue." She pointed at the broken remains. "The phoenix."

"Oh, that old thing? Don't worry about it." He waved a paw dismissively. "It was from my thankfully short-lived realistic period. I was thinking of giving it to Fluttershy, but I'm sure I can come up with something much better to give her."

Twilight drew in on herself, feeling even more guilty. One of the very few things Discord had probably ever done in his existence that looked genuinely beautiful to pony eyes, and she had casually destroyed it because she was mad about library books. "I'm sorry," she whispered again.

"Do stop apologizing, it's getting tedious."

Twilight looked up. "But I hurt you. And I wrecked your things."

"You didn't hurt me; a few minor bruises here and there, but nothing I couldn't wish away with a snap. And now I've learned an important lesson! Librarians should be informed of what books you're taking out!" He sidled up to her, leaning sideways, and put his eagle arm around her in an awkward sideways hug. "Buuut, if you really want to make it up to me, and you insist that I have to return all the books... perhaps you could help me! After all, as a librarian yourself, you're sooo skilled at sorting and classifying books..."

She sighed. "What are you asking for, Discord?"

"Just a teensy bit of help in separating out which books go to what library? Sorting things correctly always gives me the most horrendous headache."

That was actually much less unreasonable than she was expecting. "Sure. But can you send me home, first? I've been wandering around this place without any sleep and with nothing to eat but pudding and a mushroom potato pie for I don't know how long..."

"Oh, of course! Not a problem in the slightest!"

Discord snapped his talon, and the two of them were suddenly standing in the Golden Oaks library. Spike barreled into Twilight, nearly knocking her over.

"Twilight! Where have you been? I was worried sick! Pinkie said something about you going to another dimension to find Discord—"

"That's kind of what happened, yes," Twilight said. "Spike, can I get ice water and something to eat? I'm starving."

"Aren't you going to offer me anything? I am your guest," Discord said. "And considering that you destroyed a good bit of the food in my pantry..."

"Can't you just snap yourself up something?"

"Yes, but I want you to feed me. Isn't that what friends do when their friends come to visit?"

"You didn't offer me anything to eat."

"I didn't even know you were there until you started throwing books at me."

"I've got enough fresh salad to feed the whole gang, so I'll just bring out bowls for both of you," Spike said. "Twilight, did you want coffee?"

Twilight's mood lit up immediately. "Yes! Yes, please!"

"And, um, Discord, uh... we do actually have some chocolate milk?"

Discord pouted. "What, you think just because I did the chocolate milk rain one time that that's the only thing I drink?" He rolled his eyes and gazed at the ceiling, throwing out his arms. "'What can we serve the embodiment of chaos to drink? I know! Chocolate milk! He made it rain chocolate milk once, so obviously the only thing he likes to drink, now and forever, is chocolate milk! Don't even contemplate giving him raspberry lemonade, or apple cider, or pickle juice... no, it must be chocolate milk, because plainly that's the only thing he drinks!'"

"Uh... ok, the only other things we have are water, apple juice and regular milk..."

"Oh, go ahead, the chocolate milk will be fine."

"Oookay then." Spike headed off toward the kitchen.

"Was that really necessary?" Twilight said. "You're just confusing him."

"Hello, have you met me?"

"Uh... Twilight?" Spike's voice came from the kitchen. "You might wanna look out the window."

Uh-oh. Twilight ran to the door, pulling it open with her hooves since her horn still hurt, and looked outside. At first nothing seemed amiss... but when she looked in the direction of the kitchen, and the area Spike would be able to see out its window, she saw a gigantic stack of books. It was a mountain, easily three times taller than Discord, and wider than the spread of the library tree's branches.

"DISCORD!"

"What?" The draconequus was at her side. "You did promise to help me sort them, did you not?"

"I thought we were going to do that in your dimension! Not on my lawn!"

"But you asked me to send you home." If it wasn't for the twinkle in his eye, Twilight might have actually thought his bewildered tone was sincere. "I didn't think you'd want to go back to my humble abode now that you've left it."

Twilight sighed. "I am going to eat my salad and drink my coffee. And then I am going to bed. And then, after I get some sleep because I was wandering around your bizarre dimension all night, Spike and I will sort your books into piles based on what library they came from. Unless I sleep past sundown, in which case we'll do it in the morning. Spike! What's the weather report? Are the pegasi supposed to be bringing rain tonight?"

"Nope! Sunny days the rest of the week!"

"Okay, great!" She turned back to Discord. "When we start sorting, I expect you to be here. I won't make you sort anything because I'm fairly sure you'll do it wrong, but I want you here to start teleporting books back to their correct libraries, and cleaning and repairing any books you damaged. Do you understand me?"

"Sir, yes, Sir!" Discord saluted, suddenly dressed as a Royal Guard cadet, with Twilight in her brother's formal uniform as Captain of the Guard.

"All right." She turned around wearily and went back into the library to eat her salad. Discord followed.

"Dear Princess Celestia," she composed in her head. "I'm sorry I went against your instructions and pursued the book thief myself, but I've learned some very important lessons as a result..."

Author's Note

YAY! Finally finished a multi-parter where the parts were spaced over more than a month! Be Discreet was just two parts, and both Traitor and What About Twilight? were written entirely within one month and hardly count as multi-parters at all.

The title of the chapter and of the story come from the Peter Gabriel song "Signal to Noise."

There are lines from "Romeo and Juliet" and Poe's "The Tell Tale Heart" in the section with the books reading themselves. The punchline to the brick joke is probably from a joke book, and the line from the romance novel is inspired by Woolly's Fluttercord story "The Taxonomy of the Lower Reaches of the Discordian Dimension."

An icosahedron is a 20-sided regular solid, aka, a 20-sided die from D&D or other roleplaying games.

John de Lancie is dyslexic. I could never figure out how to use that in a Q story because Q having any difficulty with reading made no sense, but with Discord it works perfectly well.