Strategy

Actually living in what had become of Ponyville was a surreal experience.

The universal cycle of day and night no longer existed. What had replaced it was too short, and too irregular, for any norm to establish itself. Now, ponies just slept when they were tired, and woke up whenever. There was no penalty to oversleeping, and only skilled magic users were even capable of setting themselves an alarm, because everything that functioned as a watch had stopped working. No-one could tell what time of day it was anymore.

Most ponies were no longer working, because most jobs were no longer functional. There was no way to have school without a system measuring time in place. There was no way to create things, because they would spontaneously break, or explode, or transform, or duplicate, or disappear, or else do the opposite of what they were supposed to. There was no way to tend to a garden, or work on a farm, because plants didn’t behave the way they used to. There was no way to regulate the weather. And there was no way to run a business; ponies who tried seemed to receive a disproportionate share of chaos, and money had become utterly worthless ever since large quantities of bits had started popping up across town.

Doctors and other health workers were among the few whose jobs were still needed – now even more than before. Although no-one had died yet, it wasn’t uncommon for minor or medium sized accidents to occur: ponies would stumble, fall, or produce accidents themselves upon receiving temporary disabilities, which was something that happened at an alarming rate.

There was no sense of order that had survived Ponyville’s restructuring into Discord’s personal playground. It had become a perfect anarchy.