Being Chaos

Chapters

From Horror to Delight! Our Hero Has An Argument With A Truck And Wakes Up In Equestria Rather Stoned
Moral Conundrum?! Our Hero Reviews the Situation
The Magic of Friendship! Our Hero Discovers It's A Real Thing, Actually
The Risk Of Insanity?! In Which Our Hero Discovers Why Celestia Wanted Him Out Of Stone

From Horror to Delight! Our Hero Has An Argument With A Truck And Wakes Up In Equestria Rather Stoned

Author's Note

Please forgive the poor treatment of Spike. I like him quite a bit, but the main character of this story is unimpressed.

We are going to be tacking pretty close to canon at first.

As mentioned in my story description, Eric is not a self insert. For one thing, my self inserts are female, for obvious reasons. About the only thing I have in common with the guy is a handful of opinions and a desire to get jiggy with John de Lancie. :-) His name isn't an homage to the Eric who is the Smooze in Who Told You This Was A Good Idea?!, either, although that is a great story and you should read it.

From Horror to Delight! Our Hero Has An Argument With A Truck And Wakes Up In Equestria Rather Stoned

I have to admit that when I woke up without being able to see, feel my own body, or move, nothing about my situation surprised me. Upset me, sure. I'd expected to be dead. Not that I particularly wanted to be dead, but if the alternative was total paralysis, well, death was either nothingness or an afterlife. Either one would be better than this.

From somewhere, distantly, I could hear voices. Nothing I recognized, but I wouldn't have expected differently. For a while I tried to listen, attempting to figure out where I was. Shouldn't I be in a hospital? Where was the annoying beeping of monitors, doctors yelling "STAT", the nurses confessing their romantic entanglements at inopportune moments?... I'll admit it, I've never been in a hospital before, so everything I know about them comes from television shows.

I couldn't hear anything like that. Mostly I was hearing nature noises, and voices off in the distance. Wait, was I outside? Maybe I'd been thrown clear of the car. If that was the case... considering that I couldn't see, feel or move, I probably wasn't going to have to put up with this for very long. If I wasn't out where cars could run me over, wild animals were probably going to get me sooner or later.

What a cheerful thought.

Because I really didn't have anything to entertain me in the here and now, and there wasn't exactly anything I could do at the moment, I thought about how I got to this point in my life. Funny how you rethink all your life choices when you end up in a place like this.

Technically, I suppose I shouldn't have been looking at my phone while I was driving at all. But it's not like I'm a religious dude or anything, so how was I supposed to know where the church was without checking my phone for directions? I didn't even want to go, but, well, when you've just been forcefully evicted from your apartment, by cops no less, there aren't a lot of safe places to sleep. I'm a skinny nerd, okay? No way I was going to go to a homeless shelter and get beat up and robbed, or worse, by some drug addict who's built like a linebacker. And I was planning on sleeping in my car, obviously. When you've got a car, and you're homeless, that's just what you do. But the Church of the Harmonious Redeemer supposedly actively encourages homeless people who have cars to park in their parking lot and sleep, as long as they get out in time for the Sunday morning crowd to come in, and it was Thursday so I'd have had a few days before I'd have to worry about it. I was also told they have free breakfast.

So there I was, driving down the highway in the middle of the night, trying to check my phone to see where my exit was, when the phone slipped from my fingers and fell on the floor on the passenger side. And yes, I know I probably should have pulled over, but I didn't think of it, okay? I'm a smart guy, the grades I get when I feel like actually paying attention prove that, but everyone who knows me says I have no common sense, and I can't really argue against that.

I leaned over to the side, taking my eyes off the road for just a moment, so I could grab my phone. And when I sat back up in triumph, having retrieved the device and clutching it in my fingers... I couldn't see the road anymore, because there were two very bright lights shining directly into my face. Also, a really, really, really loud horn blaring.

I didn't even really have time to finish saying "Oh shit" before the truck hit me.

If I was paralyzed and blind, I'd gotten off easy. Or most people would think that, anyway. Personally, as I've pointed out, I'd have preferred being dead.

Then I heard a voice that sounded vaguely familiar, a woman's voice. Not really familiar-familiar, but possibly one of my old foster moms, or social workers, or someone like that come to visit?... Nah, what were the odds of that? None of them ever liked me enough to visit me in the hospital, and besides, pigeons were cooing pretty loudly around me, so I was fairly sure I wasn't actually in a hospital.

I strained to listen; it was the only sense I had left. Words came to me. "escort... princess... dangerous..." and then the vaguely familiar woman, "handle... made sure... safety... ponies..."

Ponies?

Ponies?

I knew that voice now, and now I knew exactly what was happening to me.

There's a story, kids have to read it in school, called "An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge", by the most sarcastic, snarky son-of-a-gun to come out of the 19th century. Personal hero of mine, Ambrose Bierce, also wrote "The Devil's Dictionary" which had hilariously satirical definitions of words, but I'm getting off point here. In "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", a man's about to be hung, but the rope breaks miraculously and he gets away. He travels for days, trying to get back to his family. But just as he reaches his home and is about to embrace his wife, there's a blow to the back of his neck and he's dead. Turns out he hallucinated the whole thing in the moment between being dropped and coming to a fatal stop, a dream his brain made up for him to relieve his intense fear of his imminent death.

So obviously, if I was hearing Princess Celestia, sparkly pony princess from the children's cartoon My Little Pony, I was about to die, and I was dreaming this.

To be honest, the thought irritated me. Why would my brain make up a dream where I'm in the world of My Little Pony, except paralyzed and unable to see or feel anything? If I was gonna have a dream, why couldn't it be of me at a wild party where people are doing fun and unpredictable things and everyone loves my jokes and I'm the belle of the ball?

Then she spoke, and I understood. "Hello, Discord."

If I could have spoken, I wouldn't have been able to stop myself from squee'ing like one of the little girls this show is written for. Discord is the entire reason I even know this show exists. He's my second favorite character in anything at all, the first being Q from Star Trek. And the last time he appeared in one of the episodes, he got turned to stone. So, in my dream, I'm Discord, but I'm still in stone because my body's paralyzed in real life? That's not going to be any fun unless I can break out of stone in the dream, I thought. But if I could...? Oh, the fun I could have!

"You and I both know this won't hold you forever," she said. "The bearers of the Elements of Harmony are mortal. If every time the Elements change hooves, it breaks your seal, there's no way we can contain you forever." Well, you got that right. It's my dream, so there's no way I'm going to stick around as a statue any longer than I have to. "And I've foreseen many great dangers besetting Equestria. I need... I don't know if she'll achieve what I need her to be, but she's so close, and I'm so afraid of something stopping her before she becomes what she's destined to be..." She? Who's she, the cat? One of my old foster moms used to say that. Pronouns are not a perfect substitute for nouns, prissy princess. Oh, well, I could guess; she's probably talking about Twilight, who after all is the main character of the show.

"I need your power. You were never truly evil, just... uncaring in how you wielded your chaos." At first I thought, yay, I'm vindicated in my opinion that Discord is not the monster some bronies think he is, and then I realized... it's my dream. Of course it's my version of Discord. Who is a badass, don't get me wrong, and can be quite ruthless and sometimes very cruel if he thinks it's justified, but mostly just wants to have fun and thinks that the entire world is his playground, because it is.

"I think, possibly, you could be persuaded to reform, and use your power for Equestria's benefit rather than detriment." You call chocolate rain detrimental? When I was a kid I'd have killed for chocolate milk to fall out of the sky.

"And I didn't know, before, that you were awake and aware in stone. I thought that when we sealed you, you'd be unconscious, like the victim of a cockatrice stoning. But when you said it was lonely being in stone... I didn't realize it then, when you were taunting me, but the implications came to me later. You're alive in there. You can hear me." No shit, Sherlock. No, wait, I'm sorry, I'm Discord in this dream, right? I can't use language that's inappropriate for a Y7 rating. How about, "well, duh?" Nah, sounds too much like Rainbow Dash. I'll have to think about this.

"You want to get out, and have some freedom... and I want you to reform, and help Equestria. Perhaps we can both get what we want."

Oh wait a minute now, "reform"? Oh, you did not just say that. No way. I'm dreaming about being a villain? I'm gonna be a villain. And anyway, how do you reform chaos? Discord isn't a pony, who's driven to do bad things because of some unspeakable trauma in his life or whatever; he's the Spirit of frickin' Chaos and Disharmony. That's his nature, that's what he is. He's not evil, he's chaos, and he can't not be chaos or he wouldn't be himself.

I immediately decided that I did not particularly like this plan, but I liked the idea of getting out of stone well enough to play along for a bit. Once I was free, what was going to stop me from teleporting the Elements of Harmony to six different places that are separated from each other by oceans, or maybe dimensions? I bet Discord could go to different dimensions if he wanted to.

You might ask, as many bronies have, "why not just kill them?" The obvious answer is that it's a children's cartoon. Y7 rating, remember? I mean, it's my dream, so maybe I could kill them, but the other reason is that I thought it might be out of character. See, Discord went way out of his way to break the ponies' minds, but never threatened them with anything that might even make you think of death. Nightmare Moon pulled some stunts that could theoretically have killed some ponies, and Chrysalis storing ponies in green goop doesn't sound like it's real healthy for them, and Sombra flung around those black crystals without any concern if he speared a pony with them, but Discord made most of his victims enjoy what he'd done to their heads, aside from the Mane 6 (and Berry Punch). He was excited when he showed off his chaos to Twilight. This isn't a guy who wants to kill ponies, this is a guy who wants ponies to like what he does, and when they don't like it, he decides "screw'em if they can't take a joke" and does what he wants anyway. He's not some grimdark monster out of a 90's comic book.

So, why not destroy the Elements? Um, duh. Sorry, still sounds like Rainbow Dash, I gotta figure out how Discord would express that idea. "Oh, really? Did you come up with that yourself? Oh my, I never thought of that idea! Your Ph. D. is in the mail, Dr. Einstein!" Yeah, that sounds better. Anyway, no one who actually paid attention during the first episode should be asking that question. Nightmare Moon did destroy the Elements, right in front of the Mane 6, and they just reconstituted them into better sparkly gems through the Magic of Friendship, bleh. Obviously, destroying the Elements is not a thing you can actually do in this universe, and since I know enough of the canon to know that, I knew it wouldn't work in my dream, either.

But all 6 of them are needed. And if, say, Twilight was spontaneously sent to go visit her brother in the Crystal Empire and Rainbow Dash was sent into a dimension where Daring Do is real, they'd have no hope of stopping me.

I heard male voices, and Princess Celestia directing someone to be careful with me, and a whinny or two, and the sound of cart wheels creaking, and then air rushing past. They were transporting me somewhere. Princess Celestia's Reform School for Wayward Draconequui? A maximum security prison? A little tiny island in the middle of the ocean? Oh, I was so excited to see! Anything would be better than this.

I tried not to think about the fact that the dream would abruptly end without warning the moment I died. I've always believed in living in the moment.

But here I am, going on and on about my wonderful dream where I'm Discord and about to be set free from stone, and I haven't even explained who I am, or why a 20-something nerd with a bad history of making teachers and social workers' lives hell would be watching, let alone enjoying, a cartoon about sparkly pony princesses. (Technically it is not about the princesses, but they're in it. It is about unicorns, though. And pegasi. And even the normal ponies don't actually look much like ponies and come in ridiculous colors.)

So. I'm Eric Reese, and I'm a bad bad boy. I got thrown out of almost every foster home I ever had for playing pranks on my foster siblings and parents. I got thrown out of three schools, too, but public school legally has to let you attend somewhere, so I went to the high school for juvenile delinquents, which was nothing at all like Cromartie High School, much to my sorrow. I like video games, and anime, and science fiction. And when I was a kid, I loved Star Trek.

See, I'm mixed race. We don't know how many races or which ones, because no one has any idea who my father is and my mom didn't answer a lot of questions before ditching me at the hospital. There's black, and probably Native American or Hispanic, who can tell? Maybe Asian, maybe not. Probably some white too; in the United States it's kinda hard to avoid having some of that in your ancestry unless you just got off a boat, or a plane.

I liked the original Star Trek because Spock was mixed race, like me, and didn't really fit in in either his mother or his father's society, and was a dry, sarcastic genius who trolled everyone by pretending he wasn't. And I liked Kirk because he was a trickster. Everyone remembers Kirk as being a suave ladies' man who liked to punch things, but that's like declaring a Rubix Cube is red because that's the only side you looked at. Kirk wanted peace, but he'd kick your backside if he had to. He was smart, and he used every weapon in his arsenal to protect his people and accomplish his mission, including lying, trickery, seduction, speechifying, relying on Spock and McCoy, and did I mention the trickery? I identified a good bit with Kirk when I was little. Spock might have been the mixed race dude but I obviously wasn't Spock.

When you're a foster kid, you watch what the other kids put on TV – you don't have the luxury of your own personal Netflix subscription. And most places I stayed had basic cable, maybe ESPN or CNN or some other boring crap like that, so I watched a lot of stuff from ancient syndicated television. I didn't have a chance to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation until I was around 13 or 14 or so.

Well, I fell in love with Q. Not in a platonic, no-homo way either; I didn't actually know what my sexual orientation even was yet (it turned out eventually that my sexual orientation is "Yes"), but I knew that I would absolutely get down in the sheets with John de Lancie if I had the opportunity. Q was good-looking, he was sarcastic and witty, he was a trickster, and he could do anything. A snap of his fingers, and there would be chaos. Me, I had to play elaborate practical jokes on my foster siblings by hacking their Minecraft server and modding their mobs so pigs could fly. That took me weeks to set up.

Even more than I loved his sarcasm and his superpowers, I loved the fact that Q took a pin to Picard's balloon of pompousness every chance he got. See, I'd never bought that Star Trek was a utopia where humanity has fixed all its problems, and there isn't any money (what is Harry Mudd trying to earn then?), and there's no racism... the way McCoy, who's friends with Spock, treats Spock for being Vulcan makes it clear racism is alive and well in Star Trek, it's just not applied within species. When TNG came along, it tried to claim that no, money really doesn't exist, and look, we're totally not racist anymore, and we have made the universe so safe that we can fly around in a beige office building and bring our kids to work. And then here's Q, saying, "No, you're full of baloney. The universe is terrifying and wonderful, full of things both awesome and awful, horrors and delights, and sometimes they're the same thing. It's not safe. What you don't know can kill you. All your wonderful speeches about how great humanity is don't change the fact that you're small and pathetic and the universe is bigger and stranger than you can possibly imagine." I couldn't believe in the sanitized perfection TNG was trying to sell me, but I could believe in Q's take on the universe.

To make matters even more awesome, I could do a pretty passable John de Lancie impression, and as I got older and my voice changed, I actually got better at it. Aside from some joke YouTube videos me and my friends in college put together, I never got any actual use out of this talent, but it made me happy.

So here I am in college, and one of my friends – by which I don't mean "friend" like they mean in Equestria, someone who genuinely cares about you and will do practically anything for you, but "friend" like they mean on Facebook, someone you know and pay a moderate amount of attention to and sometimes hang out with – tells me that I need to watch this girly kiddie cartoon about magical ponies, and I'm giving him this look, like what part of me looks like the sort of guy who watches girly kiddie cartoons about magical ponies? Then he told me John de Lancie was playing the Spirit of Chaos and it was basically the same character as Q, and I got friction burns from how fast I sat my butt down in front of a TV to watch it.

Turns out My Little Pony is an okay show, the way TNG is an okay show, which is to say, it's entertaining, I like the characters, it's mostly fairly well written for what it is, but good god is the premise annoying. "Friendship is magic! Friendship can do anything! Friendship will solve all your problems!" Yeah, no. What about people like me? The weirdos, the funny-looking and somewhat inappropriate guys who have no real friends? I had people I could hang out with and make stupid YouTube videos with and watch TV, but no one who cared about me, really. And I could see, from my position outside all the social webs among my acquaintances, how there were "friends" who took advantage of everyone they met and "friends" who didn't care, they were just using others and "friends" who would dump you like a hot potato if they thought doing so would get them some nookie. I didn't see any true and deep friendships like on the show, or even like in Star Trek. I don't think those kinds of friendships actually exist in the real world.

Discord mocked all that. He was the Spirit of Chaos and Disharmony. He made heroes act like total jerks to each other and destroyed their friendships (temporarily, anyway.) He threw the sun and moon around like they were beach balls. He turned the world into total chaos. And he did it all with style. Admittedly, he managed to get defeated by failing to notice something really, really obvious, but I could hardly hold that against him considering how often I'd gotten video game characters killed by charging into a situation without paying enough attention. Plus, of course, what I'd just done to myself with the truck.

The rest of the series was... okay, I guess. Kind of fun, but nothing all that entertaining. You want to know the truth, I liked Star Trek better, but My Little Pony was new and the episodes that dropped hadn't already been seen by twenty million people before I got a chance to see them, and I appreciated that. I'd heard a rumor that Discord was coming back in an upcoming episode, and I felt a surprising amount of regret that I wouldn't get to see it. Sure, having a dream while I was dying that I am Discord and I'm in Equestria is pretty cool, except for the dying part, but I'd have liked to see what was really supposed to happen.

The thing about regrets, though, is that they are mostly a giant waste of time. You only get one life to live – and in my case, a severely truncated one – so don't waste time dwelling on what ifs! That's my motto. You made mistakes? Ok, move on and deal with them, don't angst about them. I might be dying, but I intended to make the maximum use of the time I had left with this entertaining dream. Celestia was going to release me, and then oh boy, the fireworks that would ensue.

I could hear some bumps, some wheel squeaking, a whinny or two. And then I heard Celestia. "Good afternoon, Twilight, Spike. And Pinkie, Rainbow and Rarity. Where are Applejack and Fluttershy?"

"They had a beaver crisis to deal with," I heard Twilight Sparkle say. "With all due respect, Princess Celestia... HOW COULD YOU BRING DISCORD HERE?!" Oh, the lungs on that mare. She coughed the way people do when they're embarrassed or something about what they just said. "Your majesty."

Celestia didn't sound at all upset or even slightly fazed by Twilight's mild insubordination. "I'm fully aware that the last time Discord was here, he created serious havoc." Just "serious havoc"? I thought. I think if I was really Discord, I'd be offended by that. I decided that maybe I would pretend I was offended anyway, because pretending to be offended is a great way to troll people, and I'd bet it would work on ponies too. Well, of course it would work, this was my dream.

Rainbow sounded kind of outraged. "If by 'serious havoc' you mean 'turning Ponyville into the chaos capital of the world'..." Okay, I was pleased that someone else found "serious havoc" to be a belittling description of what Discord – I – did, but come on, didn't she get the joke? It was obvious to me when I'd seen the episode that "chaos capital of the world" was a joke, because chaos can't have a capital. It's like the line in Dr. Horrible, "anarchy, that I run." I thought it was hilarious when I heard it.

"...and tricking us all into being the opposite of our true selves..." Rarity complained. I really, really wanted to snicker about that. Oh, poor Rarity, are you missing Tom?

"And making yummy delicious chocolate milk rain all over the place without a single dollop of whipped cream to go with it anywhere in sight! Not a single dollop!" Really, Pinkie? I didn't see you complaining about the lack of whipped cream when I watched the episode.

"Yes, I understand," Celestia said. "But I have use for Discord's magic if it can be reformed to serve good instead of evil. This is why I've brought Discord here, because I believe that you are the ponies who can help him do just that." Ugh, there's that "reform" word again. Seriously, how would you even reform chaos? Could Discord even survive if he didn't run around causing chaos? He's the Spirit of Chaos, not The Dude Who Just Really Likes Chaos A Lot.

"This will never work! This is a disaster! How will we ever control him?! We're doomed!" It took me a moment to realize that it was the little purple lizard who was talking. Come on, Spike, we all know you're there just so that little girls in the audience can feel vicariously superior to dumb little boys like you. I was kind of surprised my dream even felt the need to include him. I generally found Spike pretty forgettable.

"Need I remind you that you are the ponies who turned him back into stone like this in the first place?" Oh, rub it in, Celestia. If you think for a minute I'm gonna let that happen again, you've got another think coming. Wait, except you don't, because you're not real and I'm making you up.

"I suppose we can just use the Elements of Harmony against him again if it gets out of hand," Twilight said, which was hilarious, because they only ever hit me – excuse me, Discord, I'm getting a little too into character here – because I wasn't paying attention while they locked on. I wasn't gonna let that happen again.

"Uh, w-w-we probably need a volunteer to run away from here right away to get them," Spike the Lamesauce Dragon said. "I'll do it!"

"No need, Spike. I have them right here, and I've cast a spell so Discord can't take them and hide them again." Huh. I wondered if that was actually going to work. You'd think that if Celestia could cast a spell that Discord couldn't break, without using the Elements, that she wouldn't have needed the Elements to defeat him in the first place... and I remember how she gloated about how no one could possibly have broken the lock she kept the Elements behind, until she opened the box and they were gone. Nah. I was pretty sure my chaos was going to be able to break that spell, but my dreams like to present me with challenges sometimes, and just because I was lucid dreaming didn't mean I was actually in control. So it probably would take some work. "Now where is Fluttershy? I believe she may know best how to begin reforming Discord."

"Fluttershy? Really?" Rainbow Dash asked... which summed up my feelings perfectly. Fluttershy? Really? The mare who was so terrified of Discord's picture, before she even knew he was animating it, that she practically fainted? The mare who went catatonic and needed to be dragged up a mountain and nearly watch her friends get killed before she could get over herself and help out against a dragon, when she was supposed to be an animal expert? How exactly did Celestia think this was going to work?

"Yes," Celestia said. "Of all of the Elements, I believe Kindness is the one that Discord is most likely to respond to." Well, Honesty wasn't going to impress me, I admitted, and Loyalty was a crock, and the main reason I like Generosity is I like getting free stuff and besides, Rarity is annoying, but come on. Wouldn't Pinkie Pie be a better choice? Or Twilight? I'd been expecting some kind of challenge.

Well, to be fair, Fluttershy had stood up to Discord in the maze and made him use brute force on her, rather than being able to manipulate her. Maybe she had hidden strengths. I hoped so. If this was too much of a cakewalk, I was going to get bored. And if I got bored, I might forget that none of this is real and I was actually waiting to die.

"Okay, I'll go get her and Applejack to speed things up, then," Rainbow Dash said, and I heard a "whoosh."

"Are you sure, Princess?" Twilight asked. "Wouldn't it make more sense that I could do it? Fluttershy's not a unicorn; she'd have no way of restraining Discord if he decided to make mischief on her."

"Twilight, your command of magic is very impressive, and you never cease to amaze me with what you can do... but I doubt you'd have any better chance of restraining Discord without the Elements than I did." A polite way of saying "he's out of your league, kiddo."

"What about me?" Pinkie said. "Maybe Discord just needs to learn how to use his chaos to make other ponies happy! Everypony says I'm chaotic but I'm not a bad guy like he is! I could teach him!"

"Your offer is appreciated, Pinkie," Celestia said. "But no, Discord does know how to use his chaos to make ponies happy. He just doesn't want to do that. I think Fluttershy is the one with the best chance of persuading him that it's a good idea."

"I do understand your reasoning, Your Highness," Rarity said, "but are you absolutely sure Fluttershy will be safe with that ruffian? After all, so often she has difficulty standing up for herself, and Discord is quite selfish and overbearing."

I snickered to myself. In the maze, Rarity had folded like a wet paper napkin when Discord had tried to corrupt her. She'd put up the least fight of any of them. Meanwhile, Fluttershy had forced him to cheat and use brute force. The idea of Rarity of all people – well, ponies – complaining about Fluttershy's lack of spine was delightfully rich.

"I am sure," Celestia said. "Fluttershy is stronger than even you, her friends, give her credit for. I believe she can do it."

At that point, Fluttershy, Applejack and Rainbow Dash all showed up. I always had to wonder about the pacing of that kind of thing. Fluttershy was slow, Applejack was fast, and Rainbow Dash was impossibly fast; how did they all arrive somewhere at the same time?

"Um." That had to be Fluttershy. "Princess Celestia? You wanted to see me?"

"I did indeed," Celestia said warmly. Oh, wow, she was good. I'd had a few teachers and social workers like her. They sound so friendly and loving, you actually want to do what they tell you so they'll be happy with you. Truth is, those ones are just as likely to be manipulative and out for what they can get from you as anyone else, but they're so much better at it than the ones who are more transparent about it. "I've brought Discord here, and I would like you and your friends to release him, because I think that you, Fluttershy, can reform him. Discord is very powerful, and his magic would be a great benefit to Equestria if he would use it for our benefit rather than his own selfish whims. I realize that this is a tall order, but I wouldn't ask if I weren't confident you could get him to use magic obediently of his own free will."

"And... you really think I'll know best how to do that?"

"I do. Now, I must return to Canterlot for Equestria's royal summit. You may release Discord when ready." Equestria's royal summit my granite butt. Why would she decide to hand Discord over right before she had something else vitally important to do? I was pretty sure that her real reason was that she didn't want to face Discord, based on how she kind of fell to pieces dealing with him in his first appearance. Gotta wonder about that. Lots of bronies speculate that maybe they were romantically involved. Others think he was her brother. Most just assume he was that bad of a bad guy. I'm not at all sure I'm a Celesticord shipper, but my personal headcanon doesn't really work with the "supremely bad bad guy" theory, so I think they had some personal connection.

"Okay, ponies," Twilight said. "Guess it's time to get started. Let's just hope this releasing spell works." Ooh, releasing spell coming up! How exciting! I'm getting giddy!

"Or... let's not," Spike said. Jerk. I was definitely turning the next several gems he ate into mushy peas.

"We'd best keep our elements on at all times 'til further notice," Twilight said. Hah! Dear, sweet Twilight, you think I'm gonna stand still for another rainbow blast? I doubted the real Discord would be that much of an idiot after the experience he'd had, and I definitely knew better. Anyway, it was my dream, so I was absolutely not going to get turned to stone again. I wouldn't allow it.

I felt something thrumming in my bones, and then a crawling, warm itch everywhere, like there was soup being poured all over my body and it was full of hot pepper. I wanted to writhe, to squirm, but I couldn't move... and then I could. I flexed muscles and felt a thin layer of solidity break off of me, leaving me free to move. I stretched and groaned, and it came out at first sounding more like a roar. I was a little embarrassed by how animalistic that sounded, and turned it into something that sounded more like a yawn, and then normal human noises like "whoa!" and "oof!"

And that was the moment I realized that, as impossible as it seemed, as ridiculous as it sounded – this wasn't a dream. This wasn't An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge. Every single part of what was happening to me was real.

At this point I'm going to have difficulty properly describing things, because I was hit by so many different sensations at once, but I'll try.

Sight: The moment I opened my eyes, the world seemed brighter than I remembered it, and more colorful. The sunlight seemed more intense, but not in a way that was painful. Normally just opening my eyes into a bright sunlit day after having had them closed, or covered by a layer of stone, would have hurt... let alone a day where everything looked impossibly bright and bizarrely colorful. But it didn't.

The ponies didn't look like I quite expected them to, either. I'd have expected that my imagination would have just replicated the cartoon, or else done some kind of weird 3D processing to produce "like the cartoon but in three dimensions", as usually would happen if I was dreaming about cartoons. Instead what I saw looked a lot more recognizably equine than the anime-like pony waifus I remembered from the TV show. At the same time, they didn't look like horses at all. They were tiny – I guessed maybe three, four feet tall at their heads. My Little Pony was no misnomer. Their heads were much, much larger than you'd expect to see on an actual pony, and much rounder, more like human heads – or like the cartoon – but they did have longer muzzles, not the cute barely-there snoots from the TV show. Their eyes weren't dinner plate size, but they were bigger than an actual horse's eyes (despite being a city boy, I have met actual horses, mostly pulling fruit carts or transporting cops), and centered in their heads rather than being on either side like an actual horse. They were a little bit further apart than human eyes, because there was kind of a big snoot in the way, muzzles being larger than a human nose... but close enough together that it was pretty obvious they had depth perception rather than prey-o-vision. Since on Earth, eyes like that generally mean creatures that hunt, I wondered if the legends that unicorns were carnivores applied here. They had obvious fetlocks, unlike the cartoon horses whose hooves look like an extension of the legs, but their hooves looked, well, a lot more rubbery than actual horse hooves, and wider.

These weren't ponies. These were sapient equoid aliens.

The weirdest thing about this was how non-weird it seemed. I mean, I've read and watched a lot of science fiction, and I always figured that no one would react calmly to meeting aliens. Even if you were prepared for it, even if you'd spent your life watching and reading science fiction, actually meeting the aliens or being transported to the alien world would freak you out. But none of this seemed even as freaky as the time my new foster family wouldn't let me wear shoes in the house. It just seemed like, "Oh, now this is interesting," not "Holy frijoles, this is real and ponies are aliens!" I knew I should find all of this impossibly bizarre, and yet I didn't.

Sounds: Human beings hear in stereo, assuming we have both ears in working order. I was hearing in Dolby Surround 5.1.

It wasn't that I was hearing anything I couldn't have heard as a human. It was the depth to the sound. And the fact that I could hear things that I'd have to have been a lot closer to in order to hear if I'd still been human. And the fact that I could hear through the noise I was personally making. Birds chirping! A squirrel squeaking in a nearby tree! Wind blowing, and the beat of wings in the far distance.

Smell: This was the big one. The smells hitting me were the first thing that convinced me that this was real.

We humans know we have a lousy sense of smell, but we don't really have any idea what that means. How could we? We have nothing to compare it to. When we smell other humans, we're generally either smelling product, or we're smelling nasty BO. I've heard it said that men can smell women, and that they like the smell, but I haven't been close enough to a woman to smell her since I was a little kid and there were social workers and teachers who mistakenly thought that I'd find a hug comforting, and they generally smelled like perfume and hair oil and scented deodorant, and if there was a woman-smell somewhere in the mix I was too young and prepubescent to notice. And we don't smell anything about a person unless we're standing really close or they're really reeking.

I could smell the six mares around me. I could smell things about them – Rarity wearing floral-scented mane product, Fluttershy wearing rather less product and smelling just a little bit like an animal shelter, Twilight smelling like parchment (how did I even know what parchment smelled like?), Rainbow Dash smelling of sweat and ozone, Pinkie Pie smelling like a bakery, and Applejack smelling like, what else, mud and apples. But I could also smell them, their own scents, underneath all that. And none of it was unpleasant. On the other hand, the dragon smell (how did I know I was smelling a dragon?) wasn't particularly pleasant – kind of like charcoal and hot metal and lizard skin (I am pretty sure that in my human life I never actually smelled a lizard) – with a ton of soap on top. Well, at least Dragon Boy keeps himself clean. I smelled squirrels and bunnies and birds and pegasus feathers, which don't smell the same as birds, and grass, and trees, and clouds. How was I smelling clouds? I don't know! I've never smelled a cloud before but I knew that what I was smelling was a cloud.

This must be what it's like to be a dog, I thought. Except that dogs have to shove their noses into things. I had no desire to shove my nose into anything. I could smell all this while I was standing up stretching.

Sensation: And then there was the last part of it, that absolutely clinched that I wasn't making this up or dreaming it.

There were sensations that were weird, but entirely to be expected given what I had become. I could feel fur on my body. I could feel weight on my forehead, where Discord has horns. I could feel wings on my back, and I could feel my long tail. My body was balanced weirdly. All that made sense, if I was in Discord's body.

But there was something else. Like water flowing everywhere and through me. Like air, if I was a fan. A pressure, an energy, something I'd never felt before in my life and can't even really describe in human words. Even as I was stretching my body, enjoying the sensation of being able to move and feel after I'd thought I'd never be able to do those things again, it overwhelmed me, giving me shivers so powerful I felt boneless, my body wiggling like I was a wacky arms-waving inflatable guy trying to sell used cars.

Magic. I knew it was magic. And I knew it would do anything I wanted it to do, if all I did was focus my mind on what I wanted.

What I wanted was to stand there and gawp. And smell everything. And play around with my magic. But if the foster care system and my hard luck life had taught me anything, it was "never show ignorance, never show weakness, never seem to care too much about anything." So I launched myself right into my role.

"Well, it's about time somepony got me out of that prison block," I said to Twilight. I've always been kind of a dramatic guy, but I found that with a body like this, I could ham things up like nobody's business. "What a relief!" I stretched out a paw, rubbing my arm with the other one – and snapped my fingers, concentrating. I felt the energy flow through me and respond.

The squirrel in the tree turned into a big bruiser, looking kinda like the sort of fellow you do not want to share a cell with in prison, complete with tattoo.

All the ponies gasped, on cue. Oh, come on, had they never seen Oz? The Shawshank Redemption? Papillon? Of course they hadn't, they were ponies. This world didn't even have television. "What do you think you're doing?" Twilight asked indignantly.

"Why, stretching, of course," I said innocently. "When you're a creature of chaos, stone bodysuits aren't your typical go-to fashion choice." I ostentatiously stretched some more – and snapped again, focusing my attention on a nearby bunny rabbit, turning it into the dark twin of the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog. It snarled and hopped away.

See, it was occurring to me that if all of this was real, then I had to be careful. I liked the ponies okay, I didn't want to hurt them – but when you tell me you're going to "reform" my favorite villain, and by the way, chaos is evil? Oh, it's on, sisters, it is on. At the same time, my short period in stone had convinced me that I never ever ever wanted to do that again. So I had to test things. Test myself, and my control over my new powers. Test the ponies and see how far they'd let me go. Plus, since Celestia had made Fluttershy her designated sacrifice to the Reform Discord plan, I was going to mess with her specifically... not just because I was playing Discord, but because I, Eric Reese, have never in my life met a would-be reformer who I couldn't crack and make them run away, declaring that I was incorrigible and hanging their heads in defeat. Messing with animals was a great way to mess with Fluttershy by proxy.

So far Fluttershy hadn't shown much reaction, though. Maybe she knew I was trying to get her goat. (Did she have a goat? I bet she did. Either that or goats are people too in this world.) It was Pinkie who said, angrily, "Make that bunny cute again! Now!"

I chuckled. "Oh, he's adorable the way he is," I said, bending down to scritch the giant bunny's chin. He tried to chomp my finger. Jerk. I stood up and blew a raspberry down at him. "You know what else is adorable? You ponies truly believe that you can reform me, and that you're putting your faith in this one here—" I manifested a giant version of my eyeball on a magnifying glass and leaned over Fluttershy, who shrank away – "to make it happen." I dressed up in my best parody impression of a foster grandma. "Makes me wanna pinch your little horsey cheeks," I said, and did just that.

"How'd you know about that?!" Twilight demanded.

I was kind of irritated. Hadn't I – well, okay, Discord – made it clear in the first episode that he was conscious while he was stone? "It's lonely being in stone," he said, but apparently that didn't sink into Miss Supergenius' giant noggin. "Being turned to stone doesn't keep me from hearing every word Celestia says. Although I admit it makes rolling my eyes a challenge." Time to push the envelope just a little farther than before. I took out my eyes, rolled them, threw them on the ground and had them fall into two golf-course sized holes, which I then transformed into my face as I teleported seamlessly from where I'd been to the ground where my eyes were. All I had to do was keep my mind focused on the gag I was choreographing, and what I wanted to happen, and it just did. This was fantastic!

"Well, unless you want us to turn you back to stone, you'll zap those animals back the way they were, pronto!" Oh, Twilight, so pushy. Do you really think I take your orders? She was reminding me of many of my schoolteachers, and not in a good way.

"Oh, you wouldn't dare turn me back to stone and risk disappointing your precious princess," I said. I was trying to sound sarcastic and mocking, but I feel like a little genuine bitterness snuck out in there. So many teachers and classmates and social workers, trying to demand that I conform to the standards they'd become the willing enforcers of, so that someone higher up than them in the hierarchy that ruled their tiny little lives would give them a cookie.

"Try us, Dip-cord!" Rainbow Dash said. Oh, how original. I guess she couldn't really call me "Dick-cord" with a Y7 rating, though, could she. Or could she? This world was so much more real than a cartoon, I found it hard to believe that it was actually controlled by the employees of a toy sales company constrained by American Standards and Practices for children's television.

"You think you can treat poor defenseless animals like that and get away with it?!" Fluttershy said, in what might have been a shout if she hadn't been Fluttershy, and she zoomed at me and poked me in the snoot with her hoof. "You'd best watch your step, buster, or I'll give you... the Stare!"

Right. The Stare. Which she'd used to overwhelm a dragon and a cockatrice and make them feel guilty about being so mean to ponies. But I was supposed to be mean to ponies. Spirit of Disharmony, after all. Plus, I had an entire lifetime of well-meaning ladies like Fluttershy trying to guilt me into good behavior. I was pretty sure I was immune. Time to test it!

"The Stare?" I said in my best impersonation of sheer terror, hamming it up like anything. "Oh no, please, not that! Anything but your disapproving eyeballs!"

I couldn't keep that up. After "disapproving eyeballs", I cracked myself up and started spinning backward in circles in mid-air, laughing hysterically.

So she Stared at me. Two burning orbs of blue, boring into my brain. I flung out my paws. "Oh no! No no no, stop!" I pretended to choke myself. "No, no! I can't!" Her Stare intensified. "Stop! I can't take it anymore!" I made my eyeballs swirl, like Discord's victims had when he was mind controlling them in the maze, and pretended her mesmerism was taking hold. "I'll... do... whatever... you say! Because..." Couldn't keep that going either. "You are hilarious!" I choked out against gusts of laughter, chortling so hard that if I'd been human I might have peed myself.

"If it turns out we need to use our elements against you, I'm sure we can convince Princess Celestia it was for a good reason!" Twilight said.

She had a point. Celestia had given them the Elements and supposedly enchanted them so I couldn't mess with them – and I hadn't tried yet, so I didn't know if it would work or not. I made a show of thinking about it. "Mmm... I suppose that's correct."

I snapped my fingers twice, turning the squirrel and the rabbit back to normal. And then I snapped the tuft of fur on my tail as if it were fingers. All the beavers I was hearing and smelling back in the woods suddenly became obsessed with a desire to commit selfish mischief.

Oopsie!

"Well, it looks like I know where I'll be crashing while I'm being 'reformed'," I said, ostentatiously making air quotes around the word for Twilight's benefit. Then I teleported Fluttershy into my arms and gave her a noogie. "With you, Fluttershy," I said, laughing.

"Oh, dear," Fluttershy said.

Which just made me laugh harder. Seriously? Celestia expected this to "reform" me?

There was no way this was an episode of the TV show. A children's cartoon would never let the villain cakewalk to easy victory like this.

Poor Fluttershy was never gonna know what hit her.

Moral Conundrum?! Our Hero Reviews the Situation

Author's Note

I found it difficult to start this up again, despite the fact that it's a commissioned project, because lots and lots of people wanted something from this story that it cannot give, for plot reasons. So I'm gonna be straight with you guys. Those of you who said you didn't want to stick around if Eric just does the same things Discord did? May want to walk. He does more than Discord did -- for instance, there's a villain song! And pre-Fluttercord-like stuff in the next chapter! -- but the story is canon compliant, for reasons.

The villain song is based on Reviewing the Situation, Fagin's song from the musical Oliver!, based on Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. The performance in the link is Ron Moody, from the movie version.

I have actually written two chapters. I'll post the second one (aka Chapter 3) tomorrow. That will finish out "Keep Calm" and bring us into the area where most material will be original.

Moral Conundrum?! Our Hero Reviews the Situation

We walked to Fluttershy's cottage. Well, the ponies walked. I floated. God, I could fly. This was amazing. I wondered if I could fly like Rainbow Dash did, fast and zippy, since it seemed like mostly I was floating. I could probably do stunts like her, though. My body was incredible. I could twist myself into a pretzel, I could loop myself into loops, I could bend over and bite my own tail like an ouroboros. Also, if I had a dick, and the jury was out on that one since I hadn't found it yet, I was absolutely going to be able to suck it. First chance I got for privacy, I was checking that.

You'd think all this would weird a guy out. New body? Cool superpowers? Surrounded by aliens? Absolutely no reasonable explanation as to how you suddenly ended up in a fictional universe? But it didn't bother me. It felt – not normal, exactly, but exciting and fun. More like going to an amusement park you've never been to before with fifty dollars in your pocket when you're ten and amusement parks are still cool. Things are new and different and you don't know where stuff is and maybe you don't exactly know what to expect, but it all feels like it's gonna be great. And my body felt right, for the first time in my life. I'll admit it now; I've suffered from some severe body dysphoria throughout my life, enough to make me flirt with being otherkin for a while, except I could never make up my mind which animal I felt like; they all seemed not quite as wrong as my gangly, weird human body, but not at all right either. Obviously I'd needed to kin a draconequus. I kept touching myself – not in any kind of sexual way; Spirit of Chaos I might be, but the idea of doing something like that in front of these innocent ponies, who were probably all virgins except maybe Rarity and maybe her too because she was totally the kind who would save herself for marriage, was just appalling and gross. Also, still didn't know if I actually had a dick or not. No, I was touching my scales, and my feathers, and my fur, feeling the different sensations of my talons touching my fur versus my lion paw. Noticing the differences between the flat, horsehair-like fur on my face and neck, and the fluffy, thick fur around my body. The large, wide scales on the upper part of my tail, versus the tiny ones on my legs.

And my powers! I couldn't do everything I wanted to do, I couldn't do anything they could see unless it looked harmless to them, but I'd spent my life being fairly powerless and now I had the cheat codes to reality. I made an ice cream cone, and ate it upside-down like the cone was a straw I was sipping a milkshake through. I turned birds that no one was paying attention to into replicas of Tweety from Looney Tunes. I made a tree spontaneously produce rambutans (they are the weirdest looking fruit on Earth, being hairy and kind of remiscient of spiders), and then whacked the tree with a baseball bat and made them all fall. I made a frog sing "Hello, my baby, hello, my darling, hello, my ragtime gal," while dancing with a top hat on his head. They all kept glaring at me every time I did something they could see, like the gag with the frog... all except Fluttershy. Oh, I knew this playbook. Be the nice one, the permissive one, the friendly one, to get the kid to trust you. Sorry, dear Fluttershy, but I wasn't falling for it this time.

It felt so good to use the power. It wasn't even just the thrill of being powerful. It was like making cool stuff with Legos or Minecraft, except with reality, and the energy that I felt flowing through me... well, I've gotten high on occasion, and it felt kind of like that, except what if you could combine how weed makes you feel relaxed and makes you wanna think deep thoughts, with the high energy and the feeling that you are Getting Things Done that you get from meth. It was a sweet shock to my system any time I did anything. Wow. If this was how using his magic made Discord feel, no wonder he wouldn't give it up for anything.

I tried, experimentally, to make things that were just normal. Just snap a perfectly average frog into existence. I did it, but goddamn. You ever look at a thing that is so boring, you feel like your mind is just going to melt out your ears if you have to look at it for one more minute? Like you're at the doctor's office and all they have is magazines about retirement, home decoration, and sports you don't play? Or you ever want to make something cool in art class, except the teacher wants you to do the assignment exactly like she told you to, and yells at you every time you try to add even the tiniest of creative embellishments, so working on the project feels like running a cheese grater over your brain, it's so abrasive and painful? Making a normal frog was like that. Everything in me was screaming that this was a waste, it was boring, do something different, come on, maybe he could be a blue frog, maybe he could be an exotic Amazonian poison frog, what if he had giant flippers, what if his ribbits sounded like he was on helium? I resisted the temptation, but shortly after I made the frog I snapped him back out of existence because I couldn't stand knowing I had made something so boring.

Well. I didn't have any particular allegiance to Chaos as a principle – I mean, if I had to pick between Chaos and Order, sure, put me on Team Chaos, but I wasn't like a Warhammer fan or something. I didn't normally think about the world in terms of Order and Chaos. Turned out that with Discord's powers, Chaos and Order mapped almost perfectly to Creative and Fun vs So Boring I Want To Spork Out My Eyeballs. I didn't know whether the power had made Discord love Chaos, because goddamn was it ever fun, or whether it was the fact that he was the Spirit of Chaos that made his powers like it, but wow. I could see so easily now why he'd said chaos was a wonderful thing.

Anyway, so we all got to Fluttershy's cottage. I'd basically ignored everything the ponies had said on the way here because I'd been busy exploring my powers and my body, and all that'd they'd had to say had been endless repetition of how Applejack, Rarity and Rainbow Dash didn't think I was safe for Fluttershy to have in her house and Twilight was obviously on the verge of a cranial explosion because saying this was a terrible idea would be criticizing Princess Celestia.

As soon as we got inside, Fluttershy started zipping around cleaning up. Of course, her focus was all wrong. I couldn't have given less of a damn about clutter, but my brand new amazing nose could tell that... well, I'm sure Fluttershy worked hard to keep the place clean, but there had obviously been considerable quantities of poop, pee and animal stink all throughout the place. My nose wrinkled a bit, but I decided not to say anything. I fully intended to mock these guys, but Fluttershy was so gosh-darn earnest, insulting her for her stinky house seemed like kicking a puppy. I might be a bad guy now, but some things were just beyond the pale. So I snapped my fingers to sterilize and clean her couch, and then laid myself out on it.

"Fluttershy, why are you trying to clean up for this guy?" Rainbow Dash asked. "He's seriously not worth the effort!"

"He may be horrible," Fluttershy said, flitting around to put books away, "but that doesn't mean we have to act the same way. We should at least try to be hospitable." She went down to the floor to talk to her itsy-bitsy cutesy-wootsy bunny-wunny. "You don't mind giving up your favorite spot on the couch, do you, Angel Bunny?"

The rabbit apparently did most certainly mind, and with a series of angry squeaks, tried to remove me bodily from the couch by tugging on my foot. Sucks to be you, Angel Bunny, how sad that you can't negate the laws of physics and therefore a ten foot tall draconequus is much too large and heavy for you to budge.

Fluttershy flew over to me and said solicitiously, "Oh, I'm sorry about Angel. Are you alright?"

I decided to lay it on really thick. "Oh, yes. Thank you, Fluttershy, for your concern." I waved my hand. "If only your pony friends could be as considerate..."

Five colorful faces glared at me. "Don't listen to him, Fluttershy!" Rainbow Dash shouted in her I-sound-like-a-smoker voice, flying over to where Fluttershy hovered. "He's just trying to drive a wedge between us like he always does."

I threw up my hands. "Now why in the world would I ever try to do a thing like that?" It's not like my name is Discord or something.

Rainbow Dash hovered directly above me. "So we can't unite and use the Elements of Harmony against you, that's why!"

"I never thought of that!" I said in the most exaggerated voice I could muster, one finger to my chin.

Rainbow Dash did not appreciate my sarcasm. "You big liar!"

Man, I love wordplay. I used to provoke older foster siblings into chasing me or beating me up by saying things like "Wow, are they really having sex? Can I see?" when they'd say "Did you take my fucking socks?" (The answer, by the way, was yes. Nothing works as well to hassle people as to take small unimportant things they expected to find in a specific place and hide them somewhere. It helps them learn about what truly matters in life, since the unimportant things generally become really important when they can't be found.)

So I shrank myself and said, "Now, look who's a liar. Anyone can plainly see that I'm not big at all."

Unfortunately, Angel the misnamed took the opportunity to try to reclaim his position on the couch, so I right-sized myself. I misjudged my own size, though, so my head ended up knocking Fluttershy's lamp off the end table, and it shattered.

Poor Fluttershy looked utterly horrified. What, was the thing an heirloom from her dead grandmother or something? I rolled my eyes, got to my feet, and snapped my fingers, making the pieces of the lamp reconstitute themselves as a very art nouveau interpretation of me in broken glass. "There, all better." Then, because Angel Bunny had jumped up onto the couch again while I was briefly standing on it, I whacked him with my tail and stretched out on the couch again.

None of the ponies appreciated my artistic talents. Applejack put her hat on her face. "I can't watch..." she muttered, and headed for the door, followed by the entire herd.

Twilight was the only one who paused at the door to check. "You sure you're okay with this?" she asked Fluttershy. Plainly nobody was going to ask me. I lay back with my eyes closed, pretending I was taking a nap while exercising my amazing hearing. At least until the rabbit showed up and tried to pull on my leg again. Then I started goofing off, making the couch float, scooting it around, and so forth, just to annoy Angel, who kept trying and failing to chase after me. I was still paying attention, though.

"I know it's not gonna be easy," Fluttershy said, "but Princess Celestia's counting on me. And... I think I actually know what to do."

Twilight said, "You do?" Wow, your faith in your princess' ability to pick the right pony for the job is sad, Twilight. I considered doing a Darth Vader bit with "I find your lack of faith disturbing", but decided it was kind of pointless because no one here had seen Star Wars. Besides, I wanted to hear Fluttershy's devious plans for me. Please, Fluttershy, do go on.

"I think the key is to befriend him. Being kind to him and letting him be my house guest is probably the best way to do that."

I opened my eyes just so I could roll them. (Not like dice, this time.) Oh, yes, Fluttershy, I'm so desperate for a friend I'm going to follow you around like a puppy and do whatever you say because you let me crash at your house. She had no idea how many people I'd couch-surfed in my time, and what absolute tools most of them turned out to be.

"And you really think that'll work?"

"I think it's worth a try," Fluttershy said, like every social worker who thought I could be helped if they just tried the new therapy fad.

"Okay, but if you need us, all you need to do is whisper "help", and we'll be back here with our elements," Twilight said. And then she looked straight at me, playing with Angel. "So watch that goat-legged step of yours, pal!"

I was startled; though I'd been listening to the conversation, I wasn't really expecting the focus to suddenly be back on me again. On the other hand, I never turn down attention. "What?! Look at me!" I declared, creating a pair of elegant high-backed chairs and dressing myself in clothes straight out of Alice in Wonderland, with Angel in the other chair, both of us holding teacups. "I'm practically reformed already."

Twilight obviously needed to learn my spell for transforming and rolling eyes, because she plainly really wanted to be able to do that. A vigorous eyeroll later, and she was out the door and Fluttershy was closing it on her.

I didn't think it was particularly safe for me to not listen in on the conversation outside, so I abandoned Fluttershy for the roof of her tree cottage, and leaned down to listen in. I could hear Fluttershy hunting around for me, calling my name, but that wasn't the important thing to pay attention to here. The five mares who held five out of six parts of the Anti-Me Friendship Laser were talking amongst themselves, and after you've irritated the crap out of your teacher and they're having a private conference with your foster mother du jour, it's always a good idea to listen in.

"She's really alright with him staying there?" Rarity asked.

I could hear the shrug in Twilight's voice. "That's what she said."

"Personally," Rainbow said loudly, as if she talks any other way, "I think we should come up with a backup plan, in case this whole 'befriending' business doesn't work out."

"Rainbow Dash is right," Rarity said. "This is Discord we are talking about, girls. It wouldn't be a bad idea to have another trick up our sleeves."

"And I think I know just the trick," Twilight said in the kind of voice that should have been accompanied by evil steepled fingers. Unfortunately she only had hooves, and you can't steeple hooves. "Back in my library, I've got quite a few reforming spells."

My ears perked up so hard they jumped off my head. Literally. My powers apparently do stupid jokes even when I'm not actively trying to make them. Reforming spells? Doesn't a spell that reforms someone sound just a tad like magical brainwashing?

Pinkie said, "It'd be good to make him realize it's better to make ponies happy, but you can't make him not-chaosy, Twilight, that would be wrong! You can reform someone who's evil but you can't make them stop being who they are!"

"I don't have to make him not-chaotic, Pinkie. Not evil is the goal here."

Oh, like you can tell the difference between chaos and evil, Twilight. As nearly as I could tell, Pinkie might literally be the only pony who could tell the difference, judging from the fact that the Cutie Mark Crusaders had looked at my statue – which looked like it was laughing or singing – and declared me to be "confusion", "chaos" and "evil." I mean, maybe I'd been doing something to make them fight with each other – I mean the real Discord, obviously – but confusion, chaos and evil? Really?

They all trotted off, Twilight and Spike making a beeline for the library. I got there first. The first thing I thought of was to get rid of all the books that contained the reforming spells, but as I thought the question "where are the books", so many of them lit up that I realized Twilight would instantly know something was wrong. On the other hand, they were big thick books. What if the spells she was looking for just... happened to not be there?

Maybe I was being a bit of a hypocrite, considering that I'd mesmerized all of her friends, and Fluttershy, I'd cheated with. But that was the real Discord; I was a human, much as this felt so much more fitting and right than anything from my human life, and humans consider mind control to be awful. Cast a spell to just magically make someone want to behave themselves and be socially appropriate? That was my idea of evil, not making some pies float or shrinking myself for a dumb joke. Yeah, I'd done it too, but I really didn't have any control over what the real Discord had done in the past, did I? I identified pretty strongly with Discord, but at the end of the day... I wasn't really him, right? So I felt free to work myself into an absolute froth of outrage over Twilight deciding to use mind control on me.

I snapped my fingers and summoned all of the spells straight out of the books, tearing them loose. There were like 40 or 50 of them. Wow, Equestria. So many reforming spells in one mare's library? That was genuinely scary. Maybe this pastel pony paradise wasn't such a utopia after all.

But if Twilight found me around here, she'd know I was up to something. And if Fluttershy couldn't find me, she might summon her friends to look for me, assuming I'd flown the coop. I was definitely not done with Fluttershy. So I teleported back there, manufacturing a bowl and sitting back on the couch, because what if Twilight had some kind of spell that could reconstitute a book page out of shredded-up bits? I had to destroy these pages so utterly they couldn't possibly be restored. And I kept remembering a scene from one of the Q episodes where the Klingon had hit Q with a genuine zinger and Q responded with, "Oh, very good, Worf, eat any good books lately?"

If I ate the pages, there was no way Twilight was reconstituting them.

Fluttershy stuck her head into the room. "Discord?" she said in a very slightly panicked voice, and then, relieved, "Oh, there you are. Listen, Discord, I just want to make sure you know that if there's anything I can do to–" At this point she realized what I was doing. "Umm, are you eating... paper?"

I had a delicious bowl of the pages I'd ripped out of Twilight's books, which I'd used my powers to make taste like nachos, and I was chowing down with a fork because when you look like a scary monster, it is so much more hilarious to behave as if you're a gentleman of breeding and refinement. I glanced at Fluttershy. "Am I? Oh, how odd of me." I munched on another page.

"Well, um..." She forced a smile on her face. I could tell. Ponies are not particularly good at acting, is what I'm saying. "I'm just heading out, so you just make yourself at home while I'm gone."

Wait, she was leaving? She was heading out and leaving me by myself?

I popped over to the door in a pink housecoat as she left, waving at her as she left. "Buh-bye, have a nice time! Everything is fine here. Bye bye... Bye bye..."

Okay, I was milking it, but firstly, ponies are really gullible, and even among a very gullible species, Fluttershy's picture would be found in the dictionary illustrating the word "gullible". (Or at least if I told her so, she'd probably believe me.) And secondly... I was so excited! Time to myself! Time not under the watchful supervision of mistrustful ponies! Ah, bliss!

I shut the door and turned around. There was Angel Bunny the misnamed, the jerk who once slapped Fluttershy for not making him the exact salad he wanted. So I grinned evilly (it turns out you can, in fact, feel that your grin looks evil), and waved a carrot at him. "You like carrots, Angel?" I whapped him with the carrot, knocking him over. "I'm playing your owner for a fool!" I laughed, because if Angel did manage to explain to Fluttershy what I'd said, I'd just make big eyes and talk about how I understood that jealousy can make people, and presumably animals, lie, and I'd act sad, and Fluttershy would buy it completely. And then I projected myself into the carrot and continued to grin evilly. "How d'ya like them carrots?"

Angel was not much for seeing his carrot suddenly grow a face. He shrieked and ran off. Me, I flopped down on the couch to engage in some hard-core paper snacking.

Of course, it was important to keep an eye on what was going on. I manifested a styrofoam dodecahedron, and cast my consciousness out to summon images of what all my new pals were up to, which displayed on the panels of the dodecahedron. Fluttershy was... getting groceries? Wow, that made sense. I have a dangerous and nigh-omnipotent god of chaos in my house, so of course, it's grocery shopping time. Rainbow Dash... was flying circles around Fluttershy's house, occasionally kicking a cloud so anyone with only one brain cell, which describes most ponies, would think she was doing her job and not stalking Fluttershy. Rarity, Applejack and Pinkie Pie were doing boring pony things; you'd think Pinkie might at least be entertaining, but she was baking something, and watching someone else bake is very dull, especially when they're not going to invite you to eat it when they're done. Princess Celestia was eating cake and drinking tea with Luna and Cadance. Ah, so that was what a royal summit looked like. I was tempted to drop in on them, but the fact that I didn't actually know their history with Discord, and I didn't want them to know that this body was under new management, convinced me it was a bad idea.

Besides, Twilight was getting to be very entertaining.

There she was, searching fruitlessly through a spellbook. I let sound come in, and heard her say, "That's weird. The spell I had in mind isn't in here. Spike, where are the other books I asked you to pull?"

In the pane of the dodecahedron I could see Spike staggering toward Twilight with a giant pile of books. Meanwhile, Fluttershy at the market was giving herself a pep talk. "You can do this, Fluttershy! You're strong, and Princess Celestia has faith in you!" She was doing deep breathing exercises. I assumed from the bit about Princess Celestia that she meant me, although given Fluttershy's history, if it hadn't been for that line I'd have thought maybe it was the market itself triggering her.

She was interesting, Fluttershy was. I wondered if I was supposed to hold a grudge, if Discord would have. Twilight Sparkle had rallied her friends and defeated me – well, Discord, but having spent some time in stone I could empathize – but Fluttershy had forced me to cheat at my own game.

I could imagine it vividly. Now that I could wield Discord's power, I knew what it felt like to warp a pony's personality. The research he'd done, reaching out from my stone prison with the barest sliver of power I could muster up, to analyze who the ponies who bore the Elements of Harmony and identify their weaknesses, the points I could attack to get through their defenses and warp them. (I did not, and still don't, like the verb "discord" that the fandom uses to describe the process of warping a pony's personality. I've got more going on than that! Well, Discord does.)

I knew how he'd gone after the traits in them that could most easily oppose their Elements. Pinkie, made to think that laughter was being turned against her, like when she was a rube from the sticks fresh from the rock farm and nopony in Ponyville got her jokes, and she was still a kid, so they mocked and bullied her. Rarity, who in fact is always incredibly greedy, but she craves high status and good reputation more than she wants stuff... most of the time. Applejack, who lost some friends in childhood because she was too honest with them, and it upset her so much she ran off to Manehattan to try to live with her Orange relatives. Rainbow Dash, whose famous "loyalty" can be split if you pit her family and her home against her friends, like pretty much anyone's loyalties would be...

...how exactly did I know any of this? Was I subconsciously tapping Discord's memories? If so, cool, but was there a way I could do it deliberately?

Also... what had happened to the real Discord? I mean, I'd thought the guy was awesome... I didn't want to be taking his place by shoving him out of it. Had he died? Found himself in my body? (Which might be the same thing, considering the truck...) Was he drifting around as a disembodied spirit? I wished there was someone I could ask, but I couldn't admit I wasn't the real Discord. What if they tried to do an exorcism or something to summon the real Discord back, because they decided I was an even bigger jerk? I liked the guy, but unless someone gave me a different body to occupy, I didn't like him enough to die or become a disembodied ghost for his sake.

Anyway! I wrenched my mind back to what I was doing, wondering if that kind of thing had happened to the real Discord. It certainly had happened to me a lot in my life. I was checking up on Fluttershy, right? Because I had targeted the bullying she'd suffered her whole life and how everyone looked down on her and thought of her as weak, even her friends... and she'd beaten me. Discord. She'd beaten Discord. She'd deflected everything he'd thrown at her and in the end he'd had to use brute force to warp her.

So there she was having a panic attack and it was so easy to think so little of her. Smiling and being friendly and then panicking when I couldn't see her anymore, probably hating and fearing me as much as the other ponies but faking it, like the social workers who I was sure had secretly hated my guts. It seemed like it would be so easy to crush her, to make her run away screaming... or to trick her into letting me get rid of her Element. Was she really that kind? I'd seen the Iron Will episode and the one at the Gala when she was running around screaming "YOU WILL LOVE ME!" Did she have secret desires to lash out at the ponies who treated her badly, and I just needed a way to bring it out? Or was she actually as milquetoasty as she was in that episode where Angel slapped her and she just took it?

But I had to remember. She'd been the only one who stood up to me, the only one who resisted my effort to bring out her dark side. Fluttershy wouldn't crumble. Fluttershy was a grass, bending in the wind but insidiously growing into everything, even cracks in the sidewalk blocks away from any other greenery. (I think. I'm not a gardener.) Fluttershy was gentle but relentless. I needed a strategy, something other than "irritate her until she gives up and tells the others to go ahead and turn me into stone."

Well, I didn't know if Discord had been a master planner, but I knew I always preferred to fly by the seat of my pants. Something would come up and I'd find a way to work with it.

In the meantime, Twilight was discovering that none of her books that were supposed to have reforming spells in them actually did. Serves you right, Twilight. "Reforming spell" my ass. I don't approve of mind control. The kind of thing Discord did where he warped ponies' personalities was bad too, to be honest, but I wasn't the one who did that... even if I could remember exactly how to do it if I wanted to.

And there was Twilight freaking out. "Princess Celestia didn't cast a spell protecting our books! Everywhere I thought I'd find the reforming spell..." She gasped. Wow. Is it such a surprise to you that I don't want to be lobotomized with a rusty buttonhook? How do you hold the moral high ground against Discord warping your friends if you're willing to do the same thing to him?

But that raised a question.

Here and now, I was a villain. How much morality did I want to have? I had my own ideas about what Discord's morality might have been, and all evidence suggests I was right – if Discord was a killer, would Celestia have left me with Fluttershy? But I also knew he'd done things that made me uncomfortable. Did I want to continue to do those things? Did I have a choice?

Could I quit being a villain if I wanted to? I didn't have a script writing me; as far as I knew I had free will. I could, theoretically, reform on my own. I could give up the chaos – I wasn't the real Discord, so I wasn't the real Spirit of Chaos, right? Using my magic to turn the world upside down felt so good, but I wasn't really a draconequus chaos spirit, I was a human who'd spent my life without that power, so I could give it up if I chose, right?

I floated in midair, lost in thought, not particularly paying attention to the screens of my dodecahedron, as I thought it over... and the first few lines of a song came to me, a parody of a song from a Broadway musical (one of my foster mothers was very into Broadway musicals, okay?). I started to sing it. My singing voice has never been great, and turning into Discord didn't fix that, but there was no one here for me to be embarrassed by except Angel Bunny, and seriously, I did not care what a rabbit thought of my singing voice.

"I'm reviewing the situation
Can a fellow be a villain all his life?
All the trials and tribulations!
Should I settle down and stop creating strife?"

And then the rest of the song started to trickle into my head. I'd never heard them do a song parody on the show, probably for copyright reasons, but I didn't have to worry about that. I'd actually kind of ignored the songs on My Little Pony; I'd never been much into music, so my headcanon had always kind of been that they weren't really happening, kind of like some of the goofier cartoon effects. Well. Apparently I was wrong.

"If I let ponies disarm me
And join them to spread harmony,
And friendship, love and happiness
And live here in eternal bliss.
A normal life in Ponyville...
Oh dear, the prospect makes me ill
I think I'd better think it out again!"

As I sang, I created visuals, picturing a Discord with a broad friendly smile on his face, helping little old mares across the street, manifesting ladders to get kittens out of trees, carrying foals around in his arms, petting puppies... ugh. No no no. My stomach churned at the thought. I'd never have wanted that kind of life as a human, let alone as a powerful chaos mage.

"I'd never want to be normal, anyway
It sounds awfully dull, anyway.
But I'm all alone in a world,
That I don't understand
And I'm here in a pony's house
Totally unplanned..."

Until I sang it, I hadn't realized how much it was bothering me that I was here in the pony world. Oh, sure, in so many respects it was a dream come true; my body felt right for the first time in my life, my senses all seemed so much keener, I felt so much more alive... and the magic, of course. But... all I knew about this place was two and a half seasons of a half hour kids' cartoon, and whatever mysterious not-quite-memories I was getting from Discord's brain. At home, at least, I'd known how everything worked. I didn't even understand my own magic, let alone anything else about this world, and I was all alone in my ignorance. It was a weakness, so there was no one I dared talk to about it... not as long as I was a villain.

"I'm reviewing the situation,
I must think of all the pony fic I know.
Think of stories where my creation
Of rampant chaos turned into a big fat no"

Could I live without my chaos? If I didn't want to fight ponies, if I wanted to have companions I could get along with... if I wanted friends, the ride-or-die kind of friends that ponies made rather than the superficial relationships I'd had with every human in my life... would it be worth it? And could it happen?

"What does Discord do when harmlessness
becomes the goal, and nothing less
Is tolerated; oh, what stress!
Could friendship truly come of this?
Do I need chaos? Can I live
Without it; and will they forgive?
Embrace a villain as a friend?
...I know better, why e'en pretend?

I think I'd better think it out again."

I bounced all over the inside of the house, leaping onto furniture with a microphone to sing, twirling in midair, throwing the back of my paw against my forehead when I sang about the stress it would cause to try to be good, and making images appear of the Mane 6, all around me, smiling up at me...

...and then hung my head as the implausibility of that struck me, and I sang about knowing better than to think I could have friends. At home I'd been a fellow human, not nearly as weird looking as Discord, and the chaos I'd caused had been within normal human limits, and I still hadn't had any friends. Here... I was a villain who'd brainwashed everyone, who looked completely bizarre, who was a different species, and who still had the power to do almost anything. No, of course I wouldn't have friends here.

But did I have to have enemies? Did I need to have the Elements of Harmony, the only weapon that worked against me, as my enemies?

"So should I go hide somewhere?
Would ponies track me down? Would they care?
If I kept my chaos far away
Maybe the ponies would let me play
There have got to be species who really know how to have fun
And if I only knew where, there I could run

I'm reviewing the situation.
I've got no interest in creating harmony
But is it such a humiliation
For the lord of chaos to pack up and flee?"

I manifested a backpack, a few pieces of luggage, and a lot of travel flyers, which I skimmed through while I sang about reviewing the situation.

"The Elements of Harmony
could go back to their armory
And I'll be in a distant land
Maybe in one that's full of sand
Creating chaos as I like
A tree of pies! A flying bike!
And I'm certain in this far off place
There will exist a different race
Who'll never tattle to Celestia
And send the Elements there to get'cha...
I think I'd better think it out again."

This time a beach appeared all around me, while I was attired appropriately in swimming trunks and a Hawaiian shirt. The tree of pies appeared, and I rode around it on the flying bike, singing the rest of the stanza... which, of course, ended with the bitter realization that Celestia wasn't going to tolerate me just going off to cause chaos in another country.

"I can't have a friend, I know that now.
Don't want to stop chaos, anyhow.
And whether I stay or I go they will hunt me down
So I might as well go back to deposing the crown..."

I picked up the tempo and moved faster, twining myself around a pole I'd made, doing cartwheels in air, shimmying like I had when I'd broken out of stone, flipping upside down and catching a trapeze with my tail... that sort of thing.

"I'm reviewing the situation.
I'm a villain and a villain I shall stay!
You'll be seeing no transformation,
But it's wrong to be a rogue in ev'ry way.
I won't employ more mind control,
I do not want to warp a soul.
No turning anyone to stone
Don't turn a young mare to a crone
Especially I will not kill
And I'd rather not destroy Ponyvih-hi-hille

I think I'd better make a plan again!"

Well. That was a thing that happened.

I jumped down off the floating sofa into midair and re-summoned my dodecahedron. Crud. Fluttershy was on her way home. Since my little soul-searching session had come down pretty hard on the "being a villain" side, I needed to figure out what my endgame was.

I was Discord. I broke up friendships. I caused chaos. I disrupted harmony. So. Discombobulate Fluttershy, make her uncomfortable, push her boundaries while saying all the right words to make her think she was on track for reforming me.

Dangle the carrot in front of her on a pole and lead her off a cliff. Metaphorically speaking. I'd decided I wouldn't kill or cause grave physical harm if I could avoid it, and she was a pegasus anyway.

While I'd been jumping and dancing in mid-air, I'd observed that Fluttershy's house had a structure I only saw in rich people houses, back home, but was probably normal for pegasi. Her living room went up to the top of the house. There was a discreet kitchen on the first floor, and stairs neatly tucked away that went up to an interior balcony running around the house. That was probably where her bedroom and bathroom were. But here, in the central room of the house, there was a lot of space to maneuver.

I lifted the house into the air, and started spinning it top over bottom, making everything inside the house fall, and keep falling because gravity wasn't stable enough for most things to ever hit the ground. Some things did, and slid along the walls.

This was the scene Fluttershy flew into, managing to barely dodge her own door smacking her in the head.

"Um..." She was plainly at a complete loss for words. "Uh..."

I lay in the sofa, which I was keeping stable, suspended in the middle of the room, as I finished up the last of the paper. "Are you sure this isn't overdoing it?" I asked, in a butter-wouldn't-melt-in-my-mouth tone. "You said to make myself at home while you were gone, but I wouldn't want to overstep my bounds."

Oh, it was hard for her. I saw that. I saw her force down whatever her first reaction was going to be. "I did say that, so... if this makes you more comfortable..." She dodged an object that nearly fell on her head. "By all means, please feel free."

I stretched out, throwing my arm behind my head. "Oh. Well, it does, very much so." Then I teleported right behind her, stretching my neck around hers. "You're so very kind, my dear Fluttershy." I put my hands on her shoulders (wait, wasn't there a special pony word for those? Crap, I don't really know anything about horses) and said, "I always knew that you were the understanding one, not like those nasty friends of yours."

That got her mad. She pointed a hoof at me and almost yelled, "My friends aren't nasty!"

"Well, of course you'd say that." Hands back on the shoulder. "It just goes to show how understanding you truly are." Through a mirror that kept spinning around on the wall, never quite falling off, I could see her infuriated expression, so I backed off and teleported back to the couch. The secret to really getting people's goat is to know when to fold. "You know, I think Princess Celestia is right when she singled you out as the one who could reform me. You're off to such a good start, I'm seriously considering actually being reformed." I was laying it on so thick and syrupy, I'd have gotten diabetes if I hadn't made a second face behind my face and made a raspberry.

Outside we could hear Twilight shouting. "Fluttershy, can you hear me?"

"Goodness! I hear Twilight!" Fluttershy, who had probably been desperately hoping for an interruption like this, flew off, but not before grabbing the bunny rabbit, who was finally falling. Curses, Angel Bunny, I finally get gravity to outrun you and there's Fluttershy to the rescue.

This time instead of a styrofoam dodecahedron, I made a baseball out of crystal and gazed into it, watching Twilight freak out completely. Fun times. "Fluttershy, what's going on? Are you okay?!"

Fluttershy landed. "We're fine. Everything's going great. Isn't it, Angel?" Her bunny did not back up her statement, but staggered off like he was drunk.

Twilight, still in full freakout mode, said, "We've come to get you away from Discord! He's just terrible and, from the looks of it, completely out of control!"

"Oh, but you're wrong!" Fluttershy said. Ah, Fluttershy. My one supporter among ponykind. I wondered how long that would last. "We're making great progress!"

"Seriously?!" Twilight's exclamation was joined in by Spike.

"I'm earning his trust by giving him a little space to be himself," Fluttershy said. Do... do you guys know I can hear you? I'd never directly caught a social worker being quite that blatant about trying to manipulate me.

"Hate to break it to you," Spike said, "but he used that 'space to be himself' to tear out all the reforming spells from the library!" He displayed a book with missing pages, apparently thinking Fluttershy would find this as appalling as Twilight did.

She did not. "That does explain the paper eating..." she said thoughtfully, with no sign that she considered the action to have any moral valence for good or evil. Way to go, Fluttershy! Recognize that reforming spells are terrible and I was well within my rights to get rid of them!

"He ate them?!" Twilight groaned in frustration, although it was loud enough to almost sound like a scream.

"But we aren't going to need a spell," Fluttershy said passionately. Well, as passionately as you get with her tiny little voice. "He's already really considering being reformed! He said so."

"And you believed him?" Okay, gotta give this one to Twilight. I wouldn't believe me in this circumstance.

"If I'm going to be his friend, I have to start by giving him the benefit of the doubt!" Well, that made sense. Manipulative as hell, still, but it did indicate that Fluttershy might possibly not be a completely naïve idiot. "Tell you what. Bring all the ponies over for a dinner party this evening, and I'll bet his manners will have really improved by then! I'll even get him to put the cottage back on the ground first."

Oooh! A dinner party? A fahncy dinnah pahty? (I'm sorry, I can't write out a fake posh British accent.) I could have fun with this.

Twilight's eyeballs continued to say "Seriously? Seriously?" until finally she looked down and sighed. "All right. Dinner it is."

Of course I had to pretend I hadn't been listening in, so when Fluttershy told me eagerly that she thought it would be a wonderful opportunity for me to demonstrate my true interest in reforming and making friends by having a fancy dinner party, I didn't let on that I already knew about her plan. "What a splendid idea!" I said. "A fancy dinner party! I don't think I've ever had one of those. You'll have to tell me all the rules of etiquette, I can never remember which spoon goes with which dish!"

Fluttershy giggled nervously. "I don't think we need to get that fancy," she said. "We're not hosting the princess, just my friends."

"I suppose," I said. "It's important to make a good impression, but, between you and me?" I teleported to float right next to her ear, in miniature so I was basically ear-sized, and whispered. "No matter what impression I make, I'm sure they'll never like me."

"That's not true! My friends are good ponies; I'm sure that if they see you're really trying to reform and make friends, they'll appreciate that."

I knew better. Part of the reason I was saying it was because I wanted to drive a wedge between Fluttershy and her friends; it seemed logical to me that the Elements of Harmony wouldn't work for a group full of internal conflict. But part of it was just true. Fluttershy was the social worker, the one who had to pretend to like me in order to get me to behave; the others were under no such restriction.

"I'd like to get ready for the party. I have groceries outside, but I don't want to try to put them away with the house spinning like this. Do you think you could put it on the ground?"

"Of course," I said grandly, wearing a tuxedo with cape and top hat and a mask because I have never actually seen anyone wear a tuxedo with a cape outside of Sailor Moon and I was ripping off Tuxedo Mask. I bowed, and teleported the house to the ground, melding it back with its foundation. "Anything for you, milady." The thought occurred to me that if I was going to call her milady I really ought to have snapped up a fedora or trilby, but I decided it didn't matter because she wasn't going to get the joke either way.

All of her stuff was a complete mess, lying all over the ground completely disorganized. Something inside me that's always tense when I go to a new foster family's house and they've made it painfully neat and clean for my arrival started to loosen up and relax. I guess I've always had an affinity for chaos; I prefer a disorganized mess to anything neat and efficient. It doesn't look alive if it's neat. Houses that are lived in are a wreck; houses that are dead museum pieces are perfectly arranged.

"Would you be able to help me clean up the mess? I just want it to look nice for having guests."

Oh, there it was. No, Fluttershy, I won't help you kill your house now that it's just started to look pleasant. "I'm so sorry, my dear, but chaos magic won't allow me to organize something that's chaotic and make it orderly. You understand, I'm sure."

"Oh, of course I do! Don't worry about it, then, I'll take care of it myself. But, um... broken jars of food and things like that... they aren't really chaos, are they? I mean, they are, but they're also unsanitary and spread disease, and I'm sure that's not the kind of chaos you like..."

I didn't know Discord's opinion on that, but I knew I wasn't personally a fan of getting sick. I probably couldn't get sick in Discord's body, but I wasn't willing to inflict getting sick on ponies... not by accident. Maybe if there was a good reason for it, but even then, I'd rather do it with my magic where I could control it than with actual germs I had no control over. I sighed. "Very well, I'll help clean up any filth I see, but you do of course understand I have no power over clutter." I strongly suspected I was lying about this, because with telekinesis I ought to be able to do anything that involved moving things around even if I couldn't just snap my fingers and make it clean itself, and if that failed I could probably use my paws to pick things up... but come on. Being a god of chaos has to be good for getting out of chores, doesn't it?

"That's perfectly fine! Whatever you can do would be helpful."

So that's how I got snookered into making food that was lying all over the floor from a broken jar flow back into the jar, losing all the dust and dirt it had collected in the process, and then making the jar repair itself. Reversing entropy was weird and unusual and therefore counted as chaos, right? Except entropy was chaos, right? But surely doing something impossible counted as something within Discord's bailiwick. Maybe it was disharmony. Entropy's only supposed to go in one direction, so reversing it messes with the harmony of the world, right?

I wondered if Discord had had anyone to talk to about this stuff. If he'd even thought about it. He'd seemed to be very intelligent in his first appearance, aside from that incredibly stupid bit about not noticing that the Elements of Harmony were working again, but I've made almost equally dumb mistakes and I'm pretty smart. I didn't know how introspective he was, though. Me, I can overanalyze anything.

I didn't actually like the concept of a fancy dinner party. Some of my most humiliating memories come from the foster family where there were six other kids and the mom seriously thought that the way to give poor non-white kids without parents a leg up on the rest of the world was to teach them etiquette, like what fork goes with what course kind of baloney, and all the other kids knew it because she'd been teaching them longer, and I couldn't manage to learn, mostly because I thought it was so stupid that I didn't want to put any effort into it. But it turned out I remembered enough about it to kind of replicate it to decorate Fluttershy's dining room, while she cooked a meal. Some kind of potato pastry, and carrot muffins with apple slices on top, and a cold vegetable soup. Didn't sound really filling to me, but on the other hand, the thought of killing an animal for meat, in this world where animals could practically talk, was kind of appalling. I supposed if I really missed hamburgers, I could pop myself up one with magic.

Obviously, it took her a lot longer to make the dinner than it took me to decorate for it. I did go through a few different iterations, trying to get it just right, because I wanted to impress Fluttershy – not for herself, but to lull her into a false sense of security and maybe actually get her to think her plan was working – but none of it took me very long. Fluttershy praised me for how nice it all looked – plush purple cushions with gold edging and tassels, an extra-size irregularly-shaped table large enough to accommodate six ponies, a small dragon and a draconequus, and fine china dishes. No silverware because apparently that's a unicorn thing.

I thought about her reaction when she learned I'd been playing her, and wondered if I cared, and wondered why I was wondering. It had never bothered me to screw around with social workers, because they were liars. They'd tell you to feel free to express yourself, but then if you started trying to rip an action figure's arms off so you could see how they worked, they'd "redirect" you, their polite term for taking it away from you, and if you drew pictures of dragons eating villagers because the virgin sacrifice hadn't wanted to admit to anyone she was gay and had made out with her girlfriend the night before, they would try to get you to draw something else, something positive, or else waste your time asking why you would draw such a thing and what did it mean to you and were you angry at lesbians? (The answer was no, of course I wasn't angry at lesbians; I just thought the whole idea of a virgin sacrifice was stupid, because what counts as sex? The virgin sacrifice was a lesbian because it was funny. The dragon was eating the villagers because what else would a dragon do if presented with a virgin sacrifice who wasn't actually a virgin? False advertising doesn't seem like something a dragon would be thrilled with.)

But Fluttershy had told me to feel free to express myself, and then put up with me rotating her house and wrecking her stuff. I was fairly sure that none of the social workers or counselors who'd I'd ever met would have done that, even if they'd been able to fly.

She was a manipulator, just like them. Her end goal was to get me to conform, just like them. But I got the feeling she actually believed her own horse puckey. That she seriously thought that offering to be friends with me was such a wonderful bribe, it would make me stop doing what gave my life meaning.

I meant, Discord's life. Or did I? The longer I was here, the harder it was to tell the difference. And if this was going to be the rest of my life, was it a difference that made a difference? (Answer: Yes. Unless I have conscious access to Discord's memories and I know he's not coming back, it's important for me to remember I'm not him. Or wasn't always him.)

But I didn't have anything else to give my life meaning. I'd never found anything back home as a human that I wanted to devote my life to doing; I'd spent my time playing pranks, trolling people who took themselves too seriously on the Internet, and plotting out elaborate not-actually-crimes that hinged on doing something legal and normal and taking it to a ridiculous extreme, like paying for a new Xbox 360 with thirty thousand pennies. (Most such plots never came to fruition, but that one actually did.) My grades had always been bad even though my mastery of the topics was high, because I couldn't be bothered to do homework, and I'd gotten myself expelled from college before I could figure out what I wanted to do with myself after it was over, and then I'd ended up homeless... hell, as nearly as I could tell, causing chaos and disharmony was what I'd spent my life doing. Oh, and art, but I'd never been satisfied with anything I could create because it didn't look enough like it did in my head to be worth making. Now, with these powers, I could make anything I imagined pop into existence, looking exactly as I'd pictured it.

So, okay. Chaos is what gives my life meaning, and using these powers is the best possible thing that could ever have happened to me, and I'm not giving any of it up. So Fluttershy could go soak her head. Maybe she would get upset when she found out I'd been playing her. Maybe she'd cry, boo-hoo. I didn't need to care. She was a social worker just like all the others. She just wasn't as disillusioned as the ones back home were, so she actually believed her own garbage.

The Magic of Friendship! Our Hero Discovers It's A Real Thing, Actually

I heard ponies near the door. Time for the best parody of a fancy dinner party ever, sure to give my former foster mom apoplexy if she'd been here!

Dressed as a butler, with a pencil-thin mustache because if you're going to be a refined and genteel supervillain who dresses as a butler, you need a pencil-thin mustache, I opened the door. "Oh, our pony guests!" I stuck out my tongue and let it roll out as a red carpet, then teleported to the end of the carpet and bowed. "We're so delighted that you've come. Please, do come in," I said in my best imitation of an upper-class British accent, which frankly wasn't very good, and motioned them on in through the door.

"See what a beautiful job he did helping?" Fluttershy said. "Discord set the entire table himself. I'm so proud." Set a table. I can turn a house upside down but she's impressed that I can set a table. Fluttershy, methinks your standards are... on the low side.

I teleported into the hat rack and leaned forward. "May I take your... ahem, hats, ladies?" And reached for Twilight's tiara with her Element on it. Instinctively I didn't really want to touch it, but I was wearing gloves... and I was pretty sure she wasn't going to let me grab it anyway, but I'd be remiss if I hadn't tried.

Of course she backed away, holding onto her element with her hoof. "Hang on to your elements, girls. It's gonna be a bumpy night."

I made the floor extremely lumpy. "Oh, dear! Let me take care of that. Shoo! Shoo!" I teleported and flew around, stomping on bumps and making them go flat, or roll out to the wall in a wave and then go flat, as if there had been some critter in there. Then I turned to the ponies, beaming. "No more bumps! All taken care of!"

Pinkie giggled. Twilight looked exasperated. Applejack rolled her eyes, Rainbow Dash just glared, and I couldn't see what Rarity was doing because the gems she was wearing were reflecting light into my eyes. No, that's a lie, I just wasn't paying attention to Rarity. Or Spike, who was there with the rest of the group, being forgettable as usual.

Still in my fake butler accent, I said, "Tonight's meal has been hoof-crafted by Fluttershy personally; mashed potato and cheese puff pastries, and a superb little carrot muffin made from the finest carrots, topped with a lovely slice of Gala apple from our dear friend Applejack's orchard."

"Sounds great!" Pinkie said. "I'm starving; ever since I heard we were having a dinner party I didn't eat a single snack because I wanted to save all my appetite for the party and now all I can think about is food!"

"I could whip you up a little snack," I said, manifesting a small tray of chocolate chip cookies. Pinkie reached for it, and I yanked it away. "Oh, but that's right, you're saving your appetite for dinner! Don't let me tempt you to ruin your own plans!"

"I need to run back into the kitchen to get the food," Fluttershy said. "But, um, if Pinkie is so hungry, why don't we just all sit down and get started, and I'll bring out the food?"

"Your cooking's the only reason I'm putting up with this ridiculous thing," Rainbow said, landing on one of the chairs.

"That, and the fact that you're my friend and you support me in what I'm trying to do, right?" Fluttershy prompted.

Rainbow rolled her eyes dramatically and waved a hoof in the air. "I guess," she said, in the most skeptical and put-upon tone you can imagine.

"Now, Rainbow, we are definitely here to support Fluttershy in her endeavors," Rarity said. "Even if what she's attempting to do is patently absurd and impossible, it is the task Princess Celestia gave to her and we owe her all the support we can possibly give." Wow. Thanks so much, Rarity, glad to know you consider becoming my friend patently absurd and impossible. Not that I didn't know that already.

"I ain't so sure of this, but sounds like Fluttershy's got some idea of what she's doing, and she's the expert on taming... critters." Excuse me, I am not a critter and I have no intention of being tamed.

"The food smells great, Fluttershy!" Twilight interjected, very loudly. "Spike, why don't we help Fluttershy bring the food to the table?"

"Sure! Glad to help!" Spike said overenthusiastically. I'd had a school principal glaring at me and referring to me as a "thug" while the counselor was trying to tell me I could have a place at the school if I would just try to follow the rules, and yet I have never seen such a dramatic example of someone sabotaging someone else's attempt to get a third party to reform, behave or be friendly as I did with these ponies... and the dragon.

They ran off to the kitchen, leaving their friends behind. I decided to interact with Pinkie Pie, since the others' cold stares and side-eyes weren't much fun. "So, my delightful little Element of Laughter! What's new in the world of the party pony? Any good parties lately?"

"All the time!" Pinkie said, grinning broadly. "Carrot Top just had a birthday last week, and we did a welcome party for Electric Sky who just moved here, and blah blah blah I'm droning on and on about all kinds of unimportant ponies you never heard of." She didn't say that last part, but since I can't remember what she actually said, she might as well have.

Thankfully I was saved from Pinkie's interminable small talk by the arrival of the food. "Please, permit me," I said, and used my magic to fly food from the serving trays to everyone's plate. Twilight hung onto the bowl of apples and set it down in the middle of the table, not letting me put apples on ponies' plates.

All the ponies drifted into sitting positions on the cushions. Spike was too short, so Fluttershy had me make him a second cushion. I would have thought a hammock swinging from nothing would be a better choice, but you know Equestrians, so picky.

Fluttershy began some opening remarks. "As you all know, Princess Celestia hoped we'd help Discord use his magic for good instead of evil."

Pinkie Pie didn't wait for her to finish whatever speech she had planned; she dropped her head, ripped the pastry's top off so quickly it could barely be seen, and stuffed her face deep into the potato pastry, coming up with a face covered with potato beard. Either Fluttershy was used to this, or she was unflappable, because she just said, "Pinkie Pie, care for some gravy?"

"You bet!" Pinkie said with her mouth full and potato covering her cheeks and chin.

I gestured. "Allow me," I said, and animated the gravy boat into behaving like a dog. Gravy slopped partway out of it but didn't fall, to be a tongue, and it panted and eagerly trotted over to Pinkie Pie.

She petted it. "Oh, what a cute little gravy boat you are! Yes you are! Yes you are!" It happily licked her face with its gravy tongue and then poured her some gravy.

You'd think it would be a lot of work to make a gravy boat act like a dog, and if you were doing it entirely through telekinesis and casting conscious spells, maybe you'd be right, but that's not how I did it. It was more like I just thought, "combine the traits of being 'dog' with 'gravy boat'", like a programming language, but one I was thinking in. I couldn't actually fully predict the gravy boat, though I could give it a nudge.

My biggest fan, Rainbow Dash, said, "That's one creepy little gravy boat if you ask me."

No one did ask you, I thought, but Fluttershy beat me to it with something much more polite than I would have said. "Oh, come on now, Dashie. You're not even giving this a chance."

The gravy boat bounded over to Rainbow Dash. I felt rather bad on its behalf that she'd called it creepy. Like a dog, it was too dumb to know it had been insulted, but I did, so I gave it the tiniest nudge, making it misidentify Rainbow's lap as her plate.

She yelped. "Hey! That's hot!"

"Whoops!" I said. "I'm so sorry!" I couldn't see Fluttershy's face, but I was touching her shoulder and I could feel her tense up, probably with suppressed rage.

Rainbow hovered above the table, pointing at me. "He did that on purpose!"

"Oh, well, I don't know about that." I smiled. "Mistakes happen." Okay, I could actually feel Fluttershy heating up with rage. It wasn't a literal physical heat, like the time Twilight set herself on fire because Pinkie's powers were impossible, but it felt like heat. The thought occurred to me that maybe I was detecting disharmonious emotions. It certainly would have made Discord's job easier when he corrupted these guys if he'd been able to sense their emotions. Well, I didn't want Fluttershy exploding on me yet, so I made a quick distraction. "Look, everypony, dancing candles!"

What they were supposed to do, because fire is dangerous and I don't want to cause death or serious physical harm to anyone, was dance around, gather in front of Spike since he's fireproof, and then trip and fall in his lap. If the fire got on any of the furniture, I'd quickly put it out. I knew Spike wouldn't be harmed, and I knew seeing the candles fall over would freak everyone out anyway.

But as three of them danced up to Spike – who watched them with wide-eyed wonder, like he genuinely liked them – Rainbow Dash blew them out.

"I'm not falling for that!" She stood on the table, which couldn't be sanitary. "Discord's just trying to distract us from–"

I told the candles to lift into the air and attack her. The three of them began repeatedly bonking her in the head and wings, making her flatten against the table. "Hey! Knock it off!" She glared at me from her position on the table. "I suppose that's another 'mistake?'"

"No," I said, "I think you just made them mad."

Twilight Sparkle frowned. "There's something fishy going on." Whoa, you think?

The soup tureen was shaped like a fish. I couldn't believe she was handing me an opening like this. I animated it with certain personality parameters, and it hopped over to Twilight and squirted soup in her face, then did Spike.

Fluttershy looked up at me. "Discord?" Ah, there was that disillusionment starting to kick in.

"Well, it's hardly my fault if the soup tureen finds the term 'something fishy' to be offensive." I made air quotes for "something fishy."

Meanwhile, Rarity shrieked as the tureen hopped over to her. "Not the dress! Not the dress!" It, of course, squirted cold soup all over her dress... and then went after Applejack.

"That tureen's only doin' what you're makin' it do!" Applejack insisted. Technically this was not entirely true. I'd infused the tureen with a desire to avenge itself, but I hadn't specified how, or who. Just that it needed to leave Fluttershy alone.

"Now, let's not jump to any conclusions," Fluttershy said, while I giggled behind my paws until she looked at me, at which point I played innocent. She sounded ridiculous even to me. Of course I was behind this. Was Fluttershy seriously considering any other possibility?

Rainbow Dash was still fighting unlit candles. She kicked them away. "Fluttershy! Can't you see what he's doing? He's playing innocent with you so you'll never agree to use the Elements of Harmony against him!"

Meanwhile the candles she'd managed to kick away had relit themselves and were dancing again, the tureen had gone and splashed everyone except for me and Fluttershy and was on round 2 or 3 with some of them, and everyone was cringing away from the table. It was total chaos. I loved it. I'd made this happen, I'd set it in motion, and now it was doing its own thing without more input from me, like a much cooler, real-life version of a computer program you'd made.

"Oh, well, that's a bit harsh, isn't it?" I said. It wasn't entirely true either; I was playing innocent with Fluttershy because the moment she turned against me and decided to use her Element, this became a straight-up fight, and that was no fun. It was just so much more entertaining to irritate the dickens out of ponies who knew I was doing it on purpose, but I still had enough plausible deniability that they couldn't attack me like an enemy.

Rainbow managed to capture the tureen with a dish cover, and stood on it so the tureen couldn't escape. "You see what I'm saying, right, Fluttershy?" Fluttershy didn't respond. "Fluttershy!"

Fluttershy leaned forward, with her mad face on. "You know what I see? I see that Discord's far from perfect, but I also see none of you giving him a chance!" I grinned, the picture of innocence. Of course they weren't giving me a chance. I was trying to irritate them and they knew it.

Nearly all of them yelled, "Come on!" at more or less the same time, though Rarity was saying "That's ridiculous!" Rainbow added, "What's gotten into you?! Why do you keep cutting him so much slack?"

Then she pulled me close in a sideways hug, and said, "Because that's what friends do."

She touched me. Willingly. Not like social workers did, smothering hugs for little baby me and then at best, handshakes when I got older. A genuine bro-hug.

No one had ever touched me that way. I'd had sex with people who showed me less affection and compassion than that.

"We're friends?" I said, startled.

"Why, of course!" Was it fake? It had to be fake, but I knew fake so well and this didn't sound fake... "I can't remember my house ever being this lively before you came along." She was flying, and smiling, her posture and her movements full of energy and excitement.

Lively. Could be a polite euphemism. Could be a lie. Or could be... she was enjoying the chaos? She thought it was fun?

Couldn't be. It had to be a lie. This was Fluttershy, meek scaredy-cat Fluttershy. How could she genuinely mean she enjoyed my chaos?

But what if it wasn't a lie? This was the show about friendship being magic. What if, against all odds, she actually wanted to be my friend, my real, pony-style, Thousandth Man kind of friend, the friend who would drive the getaway car to hell to get you out and back again...? A friend like she had in the other five ponies who all wanted me to be a lawn ornament, but she wanted to be my real friend? I'd been basing my impressions of her on human social workers, but she was a pony... and not even a social worker among ponies, but an animal caretaker. Maybe veterinarian at best.

Maybe she was sincere about everything.

I realized my mouth was gaping. "Oh..." Taken aback, I had to struggle to think of something to say. "Well, I've... never really had a friend before."

She took my paw in her hoof. "Well, now you do!"

I felt a sense of warmth welling up, something I couldn't remember ever feeling before. Someone liked me. Someone wanted to be my friend. Part of my mind kept reminding me, she might be faking it, she might be lying to get under my defenses... but I couldn't help it. I was swept away. She'd said we were friends, and she was either the best liar I'd ever seen, or she was telling the truth.

At this point her stupid rabbit had to open the window and hop in, making weird rabbit noises. Way to ruin the mood, Angel.

"Now is not a good time, Angel," Fluttershy said. "We're having a dinner party." Oh, good, so she can stand up to the rabbit sometimes.

"Hold up!" Applejack said. "I-I think he's tryin' to tell us somethin'!" The rabbit proceeded to pour a glass of water on his own head, and feigned drowning.

Then he held up an apple. Multiple ponies proved they knew what it was by yelling "Apple!" Angel pointed at Applejack, so of course they said "Applejack!", but the rabbit did the best impression of rabbit exasperation I've ever seen, and then threw the apple in a pitcher of water.

"Oh! Sweet Apple Acres?" Rarity guessed.

"Flooding at Sweet Apple Acres!" Rainbow Dash yelled. "And we all know who's behind that now, don't we?"

Huh. To the best of my knowledge I hadn't actually caused any flooding. "Who, me?" I said, my best innocent expression on my face, and manifested a halo around my head, because I honestly didn't know if there was some chance I might be responsible.

"Oh, give it a rest!" Rainbow continued to hover in the air as the rest of the ponies filed out the door. "What do you think of your 'friend' now, Fluttershy?" she sneered, and followed them.

Fluttershy looked at me. I shrugged. I didn't actually know what was going on, this time.

Oh, yeah, the beavers! I'd completely forgotten about them.

When I'd made the beavers selfish and angry and determined to get what they thought they deserved at the expense of anyone else, I hadn't been thinking of it as mind control, because they're beavers. Now I felt a little bad about it, not because they'd built a gigantic dam that had turned all of Sweet Apple Acres into a proto-swamp – the water was still too fresh to really be a swamp, but give it time – but because I'd just sworn not to use mind control and here were the aftereffects of mind control I'd already committed. Me, not the former entity known as Discord.

I figured I was going to need to undo the warping on the beaver minds... eventually. But I wanted to see how Fluttershy handled this. So instead of doing anything to help out or even acknowledge that there was a problem here, I dove straight into the water from the air where I'd teleported in. "Woo-hoo!" I yelled. The water actually did feel nice; a little on the cold side, but I had fur on most of my body. I manifested swimming trunks because I was cool with running around naked on land, due to the aforementioned inability to see any genitals, but the water hitting me in the crotch told me I had something there and it didn't like the cold. Also because one of the cool things about Q was the constant costume changes. I actually liked clothes, I just hated trying to find any that fit me, and with my powers, that wasn't a problem.

Meanwhile Fluttershy was trying to talk to the beavers – which was weird, because if Fluttershy can understand animals when they talk, why had Angel Bunny had to play charades to get us to understand that the farm was flooded? Maybe he saw her making nice with me and figured he needed to tell the others because Fluttershy might blow him off for my sake. Paranoid, bunny, but nice thought nonetheless. The Apple family was trying to rescue apples by hand, which had to be the most ridiculous waste of time I could imagine. I swam, and dove, and found that I didn't need to breathe underwater, which felt great. I'm a city kid; I've only ever been to a pool a few times, giant municipal things with way too much chlorine and way too many people, and in my human body I didn't really know how to swim, but it hadn't entered my head that I'd have a problem with it before I dove, and it turned out I didn't. Was that more of Discord's subconscious memory at work?

But the thing about being underwater is that it makes it very hard to see or hear what your pony friends are doing on land. And considering that they still had the only weapon that works on me, I thought it was important to be able to see and hear them. So I quit swimming and teleported up, manifesting water-ski shoes for my mismatched feet and fish-shaped soup tureens to be my motorboats (also a life jacket and a flowered bathing cap), and started waterskiing all around Sweet Apple Lake. And I popped a tiny eavesdropping ear into the trees near Fluttershy and her friends.

Fluttershy was complaining about the beavers. "They won't listen to a word I say!"

"You see Discord's behind all this, right?" Rainbow Dash asked, in a tone of voice that made it sound like she was pretty sure Fluttershy didn't.

Indignantly Fluttershy said, "Oh, of course I do! Do you all think I'm a silly, gullible fool?"

I would have recommended the ponies not answer that, but they tried, Rarity saying something like, "Only in the sense of being silly and gullible," and Applejack failing to be simultaneously tactful and truthful, saying "Uh, no, not exactly..."

"I've just been trying to gain his friendship any way I can, so he'd come to trust and listen to me!" Thank you, Fluttershy. And here I was thinking that maybe you were sincere. So glad to be disillusioned.

I skied over to them. "Hey there, Fluttershy, you want a turn? The water's great!" I called, not letting on that I'd heard what she said.

She muttered, "Time to see if it worked." And then I jumped off my waterskis and landed right near her.

"Fluttershy, oh, there you are," I said. "A sight for sore eyes." I was laying it on rather thick, I admit. Hearing her admission stung more than I expected, and I wanted to make her feel guilty. It didn't seem to work, though; she just looked exasperated and angry.

"As you can see, there's a big mess down here at Sweet Apple Acres," she said, in a lecturing tone Twilight could have been proud of.

"Oh, yes. Awful business, that. Mm." I toweled myself off.

"It is awful." She glared. "This is Applejack's home, and it's being destroyed by innocent creatures who would never be acting this way if it weren't for your reckless behavior." She turned her back on me, hooves folded in front of her. "You need to fix this."

Right. I need to fix this, because that is the whole reason you tried to convince me you were my friend, so you'd have the power to tell me to fix it when I do things like this.

But wait. I'd been looking for some kind of a hook I could hang a plan off of. Perhaps I'd just found it.

"Oh, yes, very well, I will fix it. I only ask one thing in return," I said.

She turned around to face me with a big smile. "Yes?"

"I ask that you never use your Element of Harmony against me," I said. "As a sign of our friendship."

They take this friendship stuff very seriously in Equestria. I had no doubt that if there was any part of her that genuinely wanted to be my friend more than she wanted to control me and force me to behave, she'd immediately recognize that using your Element of Harmony to turn someone to stone was not the behavior of a friend, at all. And maybe it was real. Maybe it was her friends she was lying to, because she really did appreciate the fun and excitement in my pranks but she knew they didn't.

If she was real, she'd agree to do it. If she was a manipulator, she'd never relinquish any bit of control over me... and I'd know she was playing me, and respond accordingly.

She looked shocked. I didn't know why. Seemed to me like an obvious request. She turned to her friends for advice, and all of them vigorously shook their heads. Don't do it, Fluttershy! they said silently with their faces and gestures. Don't trust him! Don't give up the only means we have to threaten and control him!

She turned back to me, looked up with determination, and unfastened her amulet, saying, "I will never use my Element of Harmony against you."

"Excellent!" I felt great. Fluttershy was sincere, or sincere enough to make me that promise, anyway, and that meant I could get away with anything. I snapped my fingers... and turned the water into ice. "There, much better! I do prefer ice skating to water skiing! Don't you?" I spun on the ice like an Olympic skater, and dressed like one too. Really, this new body of mine could do anything. Not just the magic, I could do any kind of physical activity I wanted to. Three of me popped up and gave me a perfect 10 as I pirouetted.

"Discord!" Fluttershy screamed. "That's not fixing it!" She galloped out onto the ice, with predictable results. "Why, I oughta..." she started, and then skidded on the ice, apparently realizing that stopping on ice from a full gallop is not a thing that happens quickly.

"Where are you going?" I asked her cheerfully. She managed to stop, and glared at me. I approached her with an expression of fake concern. "What's wrong, pal?"

"Don't call me your pal!" she yelled.

Ah, but part of you wants to be my friend, I thought, or you wouldn't have made that promise. She was mad now, but if she really wanted to be my friend because she liked my chaos, she'd get over it. "Oh, pfft." I handed her a set of four ice skates. "Come skating with me, and we'll let bygones be bygones."

Spike, who was better balanced on the ice than a pony, given that his feet had claws, raced out to us with the Element Fluttershy had tossed aside. "Here you go, Fluttershy! Game on!"

Twilight Sparkle called from the shore, "He fixes this or he goes back to being stone! Princess Celestia will understand!"

Fluttershy looked between my skates and the Element in Spike's hand. Back and forth, back and forth. I was prepared to snap myself away and regroup at a moment's notice, if she took the Element.

And then she said, "I made a promise not to use my element against him, and I'm going to keep it." And she took the skates.

I felt giddy beyond belief. Ponies were moaning and gasping in horror, on the shore, but the sounds of my enemies being unhappy has always just given me a thrill. Fluttershy was on my side. She'd rejected her friends in favor of me. And they had no means of controlling me anymore,

I couldn't keep myself from laughing in delight. "You see? She wants to have fun with me because we're friends. She can't use the elements against me because we're friends." I'd found the key to winning against the ponies, and it was their own weapon! I'd never had a friend before in my life, but now, here in Equestria, the moment I had one I became truly all-powerful, and the ponies who were so controlled by the Magic of Friendship were helpless in front of it. "I'm free forever!"

Fluttershy flung the skates and made an animalistic shriek of rage. "Not. Your. Friend!" she screamed.

I was so sick of being jerked around like this. Make up your mind, filly. "Who cares?" I snapped at her. "I can do whatever I want, whenever I want. I'm Discord, the master of chaos!" She was stalking away, and I hated that. She wasn't even going to listen to me? Well, I'd make her. I teleported over to her and hung my head down in her path, trying to force her to look at me. "You think you can boss Discord around?" I growled at her. "You think I'm just going to turn all this back because you say so? Because if I don't, I'll lose the one friend I ever had?"

And then what I'd just said caught up with me, and all I could say was, "Oh."

Because I was human, and I understood that friendship was a thing I wanted desperately, that I'd always wanted, and never actually gotten. Casual acquaintances, yes. Anyone who cared about me? No. Not ever. No parents, just people paid by the government to watch me. Teachers and counselors saw me as a problem. Other kids bullied me or ignored me, until I was old enough and smart enough to win attention by being funny, and then they laughed at my jokes and let me hang around them but they didn't care. No one invited me to their birthday parties, or told me anything in confidence, or listened to my ideas except when they were jokes.

And I wanted it, I'd wanted it for so long I'd lost track of how much I wanted it. I'd stopped hoping and become entirely bitter and cynical about the whole concept. I'd mocked My Little Pony for its presentation of friendship, because I'd known things didn't really work like that.

Except here, they did. And I had a friend. And I had just thrown her away because I was too busy scheming and trying to get one over on her and the others.

For the first time since I was around six or so, I felt tears well up in my eyes. "Well played, Fluttershy," I said hoarsely, trying to keep my voice from cracking. "Well played."

It's so much easier to manipulate and control people if you genuinely care about them. If the thing you have to offer is "I will actually like you as a person if you stop being a dick to me." And I didn't know what the real Discord would have done, but I'd lived without friendship, and I'd lived without creating as much chaos as I wanted anytime I wanted, and of the two, living without friendship had hurt a lot more.

I sat down heavily on top of one of the trees sticking out above the ice, held my hands to my heart, and wished everything to be back the way it had been before I'd interfered with it. No massive dam, no crazed beavers, no flood, no ice.

The ponies ran to Fluttershy and cheered her. I didn't know how to ask her if we could still be friends, if I'd ruined it completely. It felt bad, watching them cheer her, when they hated me, because she'd beaten me. I wanted her on my side again, but I didn't know how.

I teleported over to her. "I liked it better my way," I said, anxiously, "but... I guess when you're friends, you can't always have things exactly your way all the time, eh?"

As I spoke they all just looked at me, and it was the worst feeling, the rejection I'd always suffered back when I was human, "you don't fit in", "you're not one of us", with an added helping of "you blew it." And then Fluttershy smiled at me. "You must have been very lonely, all those years without ever having a friend."

"I... was," I admitted, again forcing my voice not to break. I didn't want to admit to weakness in front of the other ponies, but I'd have done anything to keep Fluttershy's smile turned on me.

"Well, you don't have to be lonely anymore," she said, and put her hoof on my hand, and I wanted her to keep it there forever.

Twilight wouldn't let Spike send his message to Princess Celestia about Fluttershy's success until she'd thoroughly quizzed me. "And you don't plan to do evil things anymore?"

I snorted. "I never did evil things. Chaos isn't good or evil; it just is."

She scowled. "That may be true of chaos because it's not a sapient being who can make decisions, but you make choices, and you can make good ones or evil ones, and the last time we dealt with you, you were definitely making evil ones." I rolled my eyes.

"If you say so," I said dismissively.

"The point is, are you going to refrain from using your magic in ways that hurt ponies or other creatures?"

I sighed. "Wasn't that the point of this entire exercise? Yes. Fluttershy is my friend and she wouldn't like it if I went around hurting things, so yes, I am going to try to refrain from using my magic in ways that hurt anyone." A few harmless pranks, though, that should be fine.

"I'll believe it when I see it," Rainbow Dash said.

I pointed at Rainbow Dash. "Fluttershy, how can you stand having a friend who's so negative? Can't she just be happy for you without trying to minimize your accomplishments?"

"You hurt my friends very badly when you warped our personalities, the first time we met," Fluttershy said. "It's going to take them some time to warm up to you. But I'm sure that as long as you behave yourself and don't hurt anyone, you'll win them over." She smiled at me.

Dammit. I couldn't keep that up. I wanted to try to drive a wedge between Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash, because Rainbow Dash was a jerk and reminded me of the jocks who used to bully me and I didn't like her, but I couldn't stand up to Fluttershy's smile.

"So would you say you consider yourself reformed now?" Twilight persisted.

"Absolutely and completely 100% reformed, and Fluttershy didn't even need to pull out my brain with a buttonhook like Smarty Pants' stuffing," I retorted.

Twilight scowled at me. "How do you know about Smarty Pants?"

I smirked at her. "A gentleman needs to keep some secrets," I said, with an elaborate fan, decorated in black, purple and gold fractals, in front of my face like I was a geisha or a Southern ingenue.

Eventually, Spike was allowed to send a letter to Celestia, and then we all had to wait around for Her Royal Sunshinyness to show up. So I entertained myself by making Carousel Boutique into an actual carousel, for about thirty seconds, making Rarity throw a conniption fit and Fluttershy admonish me that I needed to ask permission before changing ponies' stuff, and then put a fountain in the center of town with me as the centerpiece, which got me a lecture from Twilight about zoning, and then made a huge tub of chocolate milkshake, which got me a lecture from Pinkie Pie about how it needed whipped cream, while she was busy swimming in it. I was careful not to do anything that would actually harm any ponies, but I could see Twilight steaming up with frustration because technically I was not doing anything evil, and Fluttershy was lecturing her on the need to use patience and understanding because after all I was a being of chaos and it probably wasn't healthy for me to restrain my magic too much, and it looked like she wanted to explode but was barely keeping it in. It made me chuckle to myself. I'd spent most of my life getting people's goat (reminder to self: do not use that expression in Equestria) without chaos magic. Twilight could be my Captain Picard. We could have a wonderful relationship based on the fact that she is a major league control freak and might be so much fun to pester and annoy. I was looking forward to it.

Eventually, Celestia showed up, in a carriage drawn by pegasus guards despite the fact that with her wingspan and strength, she ought to be able to go faster if she flew by herself. "Princess Celestia!" Twilight called out and ran to her, as her friends and Spike bowed, because apparently you don't need protocol if you're the Princess' star pupil.

"Hello, Twilight," Celestia said. "I got your letter." Didn't that go without saying? I mean, the fact that she was here should have meant she got the letter, right? "Do you believe that Discord is sincere in his desire to reform?"

"I wouldn't call it a desire, per se," I muttered.

She heard me, despite the fact that there were approximately six ponies and a dragon between her and me. "What would you call it, then, Discord?" she asked.

"Ugh." How annoying. I hate it when I mutter something to myself and then people call me on it. "A quid pro quo, really. An exchange. Something valuable offered to me in exchange for doing what you want, more or less."

"More or less?" Her eyebrows went up.

I shrugged. "I'm still chaos, Princess. And I'm not a tame lion." I morphed into a lion, except I still had my own head, covered with a thick lion mane, and my own tail where the lion's tail would be.

Celestia showed no sign of getting the reference, which is good, because I would be deeply disturbed if there was a pony version of Chronicles of Narnia. "No one objects to you being Chaos, Discord. No one ever has."

"I could beg to differ—"

"No one that matters to you, in any case," she said firmly. "The problem was always that Chaos is fundamentally amoral, and can be used for good, evil or neutral purposes."

"Like in Ogres and Oubliettes," Spike piped up. "You can be chaotic good, chaotic neutral or chaotic evil."

Right, of course Dungeons and Dragons wouldn't be called that in a world where dragons are real. I'd picked up the part Spike was talking about through cultural nerd osmosis but I'd never actually played the game. Before I could say anything, Celestia continued. "In the past, you've often chosen to use your chaos to evil purposes, causing pain, harm and disruption to ponies and other living things. I never believed you were evil, but you were selfish, thoughtless, and heedless of anypony's desires and needs but your own. Now you have a friend who'll stand by you if you try to change that. Can you?"

Interesting. Not "will you" but "can you." I wondered what my relationship with her was, in the past.

I strode forward dramatically from behind the grouping of ponies that had somehow turned into a line in front of Celestia. "Yes, Princess, I'm ready to use my magic for good instead of evil." I bowed, and muttered, under my breath, "Most of the time." To be honest, I was probably mostly going to be using it for neutral purposes.

"Congratulations on your success, ponies," Celestia said, smiling. "I definitely sense a big change in Discord." A weird word to use there, "sense". Did she just mean what she could hear and see, or was she picking up something else? Did she have some magical ability that was telling her I was actually a completely different person? Or was I just reading too much into the stilted language of a mare who'd been alive forever? Then she half-whispered to Twilight, "I'll leave the Elements of Harmony with you, Twilight. Just in case." Oh, nice, Celestia. Way to show confidence.

"You were right when you said Fluttershy would be the one to find the way to reform Discord," Twilight said. "By treating Discord as a friend, she got him to realize that friendship was actually important to him. And something that, once he had, he didn't want to lose."

Fluttershy murmured at me, "Go on. Say it..."

I groaned. We'd talked about this, but that didn't mean I liked it. "Alright," I said, and then as quickly as I possibly could, mumbled "Friendship is magic."

"See?" Fluttershy said, beaming up at me with her hoof on my paw. "He can be a real sweetheart once you get to know him."

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught several of the ponies pawing the ground with their hooves and glancing away, obviously not quite on board with Fluttershy's interpretation of my character, but I didn't care. I had one friend. I'd lived my life without any; I didn't need more.

"So, Princess Celestia. I recall hearing something about having a use for my magic?" I waggled my eyebrows, trying to imply that I was implying something.

Celestia ignored that. "I'd like to see you get settled in first, get used to being free... and not wreaking wanton havoc. In a week or so, I'd like you to come to Canterlot, and we can discuss what I want you to do for Equestria."

Oh, darn. For a moment I thought she was going to end that sentence with "want you to do", and I had all kinds of innuendo planned, and then she had to go and ruin it. "I would be delighted to serve," I said, putting as much of the innuendo back into the sentence as I could.

Celestia took her leave, and so did the other ponies, and Spike, but Fluttershy stayed with me.

"So, um... do you have anywhere to go? Like, a place that you live?" Fluttershy asked diffidently. "Because if you do, and you want to go there, that's fine, but... if you'd rather stay at my place for a while, I'd be fine with that too..."

"Trying to get rid of me so quickly, Fluttershy?" I asked, teasing – more or less.

"No! No, no, I just – I don't want to impose on you or make demands, but I feel like, if we're going to be friends, maybe we should spend some time together. I'd be happy to let you stay at my house for a while, and I could make us some tea, and maybe bake cookies—"

"I do like cookies," I admitted.

"So would you like to stay as my houseguest for a little while?"

"Well, if you're inviting me, how can I refuse?" Also I had no idea where Discord lived, or if it even still existed after he'd been more than a thousand years in stone.

So we went back to Fluttershy's house, and she made tea, a drink I'd always found interminably dull – give me coffee if I really need to stay awake, or Coke if I want something caffeinated and tasty – but with my new nose, I found the aroma pleasant enough that the tea was actually relaxing. I tried to think of something that humans eat at dinner parties that would be safe for a pony – no meat, and I didn't know if dairy was safe for anypony who wasn't Pinkie Pie, and I couldn't take anything with sugar seriously as a meal – and came up with cucumber sandwiches, which I had once eaten an entire tray of at my foster mother's stiflingly dull dinner event because she had made us skip lunch to have room for dinner and then hadn't served dinner for another eight hours. I'd gotten in a lot of trouble for that since the tray was supposed to be for all the guests, but it paid off now because it meant I remembered the flavor well enough to replicate it, and Fluttershy pronounced them to be delicious... and I thought she might have actually meant it. She also made chocolate chip cookies, which were warm and soft but a little bit too sweet for my tastes. I tried snapping one into existence with a darker chocolate mix and a bit less sugar in the cookie dough, found it to be much better, and offered it to Fluttershy to try. She smiled and said that if that was what I preferred, she'd make the cookies that way the next time.

Someone cared enough about my food preferences to change their recipe to accommodate me. Not because I was faking an allergy but because I'd just said, I think this is a little too sweet, what do you think of this cookie, it's just like yours but with less sugar and I think it'd be better for my teeth, and she'd guessed I was really talking about my food preferences rather than actually caring about my teeth, and agreed to make cookies like that for me. The next time. Because this was going to happen again.

This was dumb. I was the Lord of Chaos, and before that I was Eric Reese, professional troublemaker and hardened street kid. I was not going to cry because a pony wanted to make me cookies I would really like.

They hadn't invented the television yet, let alone Netflix and chill, but I felt that this situation really deserved some TV to relax in front of. I wasn't entirely sure if they'd even invented movies, and I didn't want to risk sounding ignorant. "Fluttershy. Are there any plays or shows you were thinking of seeing?"

"Oh, um, I think today's been stressful enough, don't you? I was just planning on staying in tonight..."

"Heavens, no, I wouldn't imagine you would want to leave the house this late," I said. "I have no intention of taking you out of your home, my dear. But there's something I'd like to try. So, are there any plays or shows going on in Manehattan or Canterlot or somewhere that you'd like to see?"

"Hmm." She gave it some thought. "There's a romantic comedy playing in Manehattan about a pony and a griffin who fall in love... do you think that's weird, wanting to see something like that?"

Oh, Ponyville provincialism. "If I did think it was weird, that would only make it more delightful. I take it you were too embarrassed to tell your friends about your interest in this play?"

"Um, kind of, but also, what if I said I wanted to see it and we all went to see it together and it was terrible? I'd feel so embarrassed that I recommended something that turned out to be bad."

I reeled my head backward, staring at her, taken completely aback. "How... that makes no sense, Fluttershy, and not in a good way. Your friends would seriously expect you to know ahead of time if a play you've never seen is any good, and blame you if it wasn't?"

"Oh, no, they'd never expect that, or blame me. But I'd blame myself."

I shook my head. I was not even going to try to understand that. "Well, how would you feel about watching it right here, in the privacy of your own home?"

"How would that work? I wouldn't want you to kidnap the actors..."

"No, no!" I laughed, and snapped up a giant flat-screen television, which I made float in her living room. "We'll watch it on this."

"Oh! Like a movie!"

Good, they did have movies. I knew Discord had made movie-related jokes by eating popcorn, but that didn't necessarily mean ponies had movies. "Just like. Except we don't have to go to a theater."

"That sounds wonderful," she said. "It's called 'Love Like Feathers'."

That was a terrible title, but I didn't say so, not to Fluttershy. Instead I reached out with my powers. I knew Discord had the ability to display the past – albeit the past he'd been in, but not from his own perspective, so I'd guessed that he could actually view the past in general. It would have made it made sense that he knew the Mane 6 so well despite having been in stone. Turned out I was right; I could make a performance of the play from yesterday show up on my television.

We sat together on Fluttershy's couch, ate popcorn, and watched the play, which was stupid. I mean, really stupid. Every single plot twist and complication could have been resolved if the characters had just talked to each other. But Fluttershy ate it up, and seeing her laugh at the dumb antics of the star-crossed lovers was far, far better to watch than a genuinely entertaining play would have been.

"Do you... need sleep?" she asked. "I mean, most creatures do, so I'd guess you might, but then, you're called a Spirit of Chaos and I'm not sure what that means..."

Neither was I. I could eat and enjoy food, but despite doing that, I'd felt no need to use the little draconequuses' room. I knew I had a body and that it felt things, powerfully, but nothing that had happened to me had caused me physical pain. So I had no idea if I needed to sleep or not, but I couldn't admit that to Fluttershy. "I could certainly do with a bit of rest," I said, making myself yawn with my powers.

"Is the couch comfortable enough? Do you need extra blankets?"

I laughed. "I'm quite fine, Fluttershy. Don't worry about me." No one had fussed over me like this since I was maybe four or five. I loved it, but I found it kind of embarrassing as well. I was an immortal, ancient chaos spirit now, right? Not a child who'd just moved to a new foster home.

It turned out that a chaos spirit who's had a long and exhausting day after being released from stone and getting hit by a truck can sleep, and dream. But I'd have expected a silly, chaotic dream, something like swans dressed as firefighters swimming through hurricane clouds, or the sky raining newts, all of whom claimed they used to be ponies until a witch cast a spell. I didn't expect what I got.

I dreamed that I was facing the Mane 6, armed with their elements of Harmony and their rainbow friendship laser, and I was turning to stone, screaming with fear. And then, although my mouth was sealed in stone, I snarled in rage. You can't hold me forever!

Another voice came, and I couldn't tell if it was male or female. It sounded more like wind chimes than a person, or pony's, voice. You're right, I can't, and if a thousand years in stone taught you nothing, more time in stone would be nothing but cruel.

So let me go, then!

No. There are things you need to learn, and neither stone nor freedom will teach them.

And then I was falling, falling, and the darkness of stone was replaced with sound too loud and light too bright and air too cold, and I could feel everything but I couldn't make my body move the way I wanted to, and there were giant blobs all around me and I couldn't tell where their edges were and where other things, like the air or other objects, began...

I screamed. And then I woke up.

The house was still silent and dark. No Fluttershy was coming down the stairs, aflutter with concern for me. I must have only screamed in the dream, not in real life, thankfully.

I felt downright cheated. Sure, my nightmare had been chaotic and incomprehensible, but not in a fun way. "No more nightmares," I whispered to my powers. "I just want to sleep, and have entertaining dreams, and if they're cryptic and bizarre, let it be in an interesting way, not... whatever that freaky thing was."

Secure in the knowledge that my powers would protect me from nightmares, I tried to go back to sleep. But it was a long while before I succeeded.

Author's Note

References:
"Thousandth Man" is from a Kipling poem of the same name. "Not a tame lion" is a reference to Aslan in the Chronicles of Narnia

The Risk Of Insanity?! In Which Our Hero Discovers Why Celestia Wanted Him Out Of Stone

It was afternoon the next day when I felt a weird tingly sensation, like something tugging on me. I was sitting with Fluttershy in the garden as she planted flowers, turning several of them into rainbow-colored Venus flytraps, dancing hyacinths, and sunflowers with Celestia’s face. Fluttershy thought this was hilarious, as long as I turned them back afterward.

“Excuse me, Fluttershy,” I said. “I need to check on something. I’ll be right back!”

“Take your time,” Fluttershy said. “Whatever you need. I’ll be here. Oh, but I might be feeding the animals.”

“I’ll be sure to find you!” I said cheerfully, and then willed myself to be wherever that weird tugging was coming from.

Which turned out to be from Celestia, who was waiting for me in a room of the palace I’d never seen on the show. It was very tall and very wide, but very empty. No decorations, no stained glass windows… it was the most boring room I’d ever seen in this world. Possibly the most boring room I’d seen ever, but I’d attended underfunded inner city public schools, so that was a high bar to meet. Celestia and Luna were both in the room, Luna scowling, Celestia wearing the same bland smile she’d met me with in Ponyville.

“Ah, so the summoning spell does still work,” Celestia said, and turned to Luna. “I told you it would work, Luna.”

“It didn’t work the last time you tried it. Or the time before that.”

“That was more than a thousand years ago, though.”

“You know, I don’t have to respond to your little tickle,” I said, because firstly, it was true that I hadn’t had to come, and secondly, I didn’t want them thinking they could boss me around. “I thought I’d check and see if you were actually doing anything entertaining.” I looked around the room. “Sadly, this manages to be the most boring room I’ve ever seen. If I’m looking for entertainment, it’s obviously not here!”

This is not how I really talk. I was channeling Q. I think. It came pretty naturally, though. Plainly I was good at this whole “being a chaos god supervillain” thing.

“This isn’t about entertainment, I’m afraid,” Celestia said. “Although if you’d like a cup of tea—” Her horn glowed, and a cup appeared, floating in her magic.

“I already ate. At Fluttershy’s. She makes a very delicious tea,” I said, floating in the air and snaking around like I was a Chinese dragon. Which for all I know, I am. “I’m sure yours couldn’t possibly compare.”

Luna snorted. “Let us not play his games, sister,” she said. “Tell him what you wish him to do.”

“Oh!” I put my hands to my face. “Sempai’s noticed me!” I teleported to Celestia and coiled around her head – not touching her, just floating in a kind of circle around her neck. “Is this the part where you call on my magic for the good of Equestria?” I put myself in a soldier’s uniform, standing straight up, and saluted. “Ready and willing to serve! Ma’am!”

Celestia sighed. “It would be wonderful if just once, you could be calm and serious, Discord. Just once.”

I pulled out a calendar. “Hmm… no, Thursday won’t work, I have an appointment to have my hoof buffed… barbershop next Tuesday… then I’m doing that benefit for orphans the week after…” After randomly poking a date on the calendar and making a circle appear on it, I looked up. “I think I might be able to squeeze that in early next month, unless my editor demands a revision of my book.”

“What book?” Luna snapped.

“My Life With Two Annoying Boring Princesses. Should be going to press in a few months if it doesn’t need a rewrite.” I snapped up a copy of an imaginary book with the title I’d just given, and then vanished it. “I can’t give away too much, but spoilers: you’re in it.”

“Luna, don’t feed the troll,” Celestia said, which brought me up short. Did Celestia know something about Earth? How did that particular expression end up in Equestria? They didn’t have Internet… right? There were fans who joked about Luna being an online gamer, but they didn’t have television, how could they have Internet? And without internet, how could they have internet trolls?

I mentally shrugged. It wasn’t my job to make sense of things, quite the opposite in fact. “So! I ask not what Equestria can do for me, but what I can do for Equestria!” I said, into a microphone, while wearing a navy blue suit and a red white and blue sign behind me that said “VOTE DISCORD FOR PRESIDENT.”

Celestia took a deep breath. “I’m about to – no. I am about to facilitate something that, I hope, will radically change the balance of magic in Equestria.” She looked up into my eyes. “You can still sense magical imbalances, I assume?”

“Was there ever any doubt?” I chortled, to hide the fact that I had no idea what she was talking about. Discord had the power to sense magical imbalances? News to me. I was even more OP than I thought I was. It made sense, given the degree to which I could feel the magic in everything.

“Good. There’s – I hope – about to be a disruption. On the side of harmony. Which… might cause a backlash, somewhere, and I need you to be watching for it.”

With a thought, I seated myself, Celestia and Luna at a desk from some stupid police drama I’d watched once. Well, more than once. Well, okay, I’ve seen a lot of police dramas. I had a badge on my chest that said “DET. DISCORD”, Luna was up near the wall in a lowly police officer uniform, and Celestia was seated across from me. “Celestia. You’ve got to come clean,” I said, leaning forward. “Tell us everything, or we won’t be able to help you.”

“Us?” Luna said sarcastically, using her telekinesis to rip off the uniform I’d placed her in. “There is no ‘us’ that includes you, Discord.”

“It’s all right, Luna.” Celestia looked down at her sister – even with her sitting and Luna standing, Celestia was still taller than Luna. “I think he needs to know.”

“How can you trust that he’ll keep the secret?” Wow, Luna, those are some intense eyeballs you’re making. Do you have to be so… dialed up to eleven about everything?

“I cannot recall Discord ever breaking a promise,” Celestia said.

“Because he never made one!”

Huh. So my word was good. Sort of. I guess it made sense… with all of this power, it felt like cheating to lie about things unless it was funny. Or unless it covered for the fact that I wasn’t really Discord. Or wasn’t really the Discord they remembered, anyway… I was a draconequus with chaos powers and it felt right, it felt more like the real me than being Eric Reese had ever felt, so in some sense I was Discord. Just not the original one. I wondered again what happened to him, and then put it out of my head because that was a depressing thought.

“Oh, I’ll sign your NDA if I have to,” I said, shoving a contract at Celestia with my signature on it. The contract was actually just the first sentence of lorem ipsum and then a whole lot of Dr. Seuss. Most of what I knew about law came from police dramas and playing Ace Attorney.

Celestia raised an eyebrow. “NDA?”

“I promise not to tell your super special secret to anybody,” I said in a sing-song voice. “Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a cupcake in my eye.” Which I did, only to have my eye open up teeth and slurp the cupcake in with a very long tongue.

“Hope to die? That’s… a rather morbid way to put it,” Celestia said, and I remembered that Pinkie’s usual version said “hope to fly” instead.

“Well, I can already fly, I hardly need to hope for it.” I flapped my wings and levitated a bit to demonstrate.

Luna rolled her eyes, but Celestia showed no reaction to my joke. “This is very serious, Discord. If you tell Twilight, or any of her friends – any of her friends, including Fluttershy – “

“Celestia. Have I ever been known to kiss and tell?” I made a be-lipsticked smoochy face at her, kind of like selfie duck face except even more ridiculous.

She sighed. “I must impress on you the importance of not interfering, at least, even if you don’t do very much to help. I’ve had visions, and Equestria is at a crossroads. If what I’m hoping to accomplish doesn’t come to pass… even you would never want to rule over an empty world, stripped of magic and eventually, life.”

I raised my eyebrows. “That does sound important. But if there’s something you need me to interfere or not interfere in, don’t you think you ought to tell me what it is?”

“Something that may cause a little chaos in our society, for a while,” Celestia said, “although the long-term goal will bring greater peace and friendship within society, overall.” She smiled slightly. “I’m not sure you’ll approve, but I do ask that you at least stay out of the way, and do not tell Twilight or anyone else. If you can bring yourself to help, I would greatly appreciate it.”

I supposed that Celestia had no reason to expect the Spirit of Chaos and Disharmony to want peace and friendship. “Will it make Fluttershy happier?” I asked bluntly. In some sort of abstract sense, I sort of liked the others, at least from having watched the TV show, but there was only one of them I truly cared about.

Celestia nodded. “I believe it will.”

“All right, then out with it. I solemnly swear I won’t interfere with whatever nonsense you’re cooking up. What is it?”

Luna snorted, plainly not impressed with my oath, but Celestia paid no apparent attention. “I am going to send Twilight Starswirl’s last unfinished spell. I believe she can complete it.”

“Refresh my memory. A thousand years ago I don’t think I was especially au courant with the latest unicorn magic news, and if I was, being in stone has wiped it entirely clean. What is Starswirl’s last spell?”

“Of course,” Celestia said, nodding. “You weren’t there. When he cast it, it switched around the Pillars’ cutie marks, but that was all it did. What I believe he intended, what I believe his goal was… was to ascend a pony to become an alicorn. And if Twilight finishes that spell… that is what she’ll become.”

She plainly thought I knew what the word “alicorn” meant, but the only episode that had brought it up was the one where Trixie got a dark magic boost from something called the Alicorn Amulet, and I didn’t think Celestia would be so enthusiastic about Twilight becoming a psychotic overpowered would-be dictator. “Fine,” I said. “What happens if it goes wrong? If she can’t complete it?”

“Well, most likely, nothing at all will happen, if she tries to revise it and fails. But if she casts it as it stands… it will probably swap her friends’ cutie marks.”

“Right, you said that was what the spell does. If she can’t fix it, then what happens?”

“Then their cutie marks are all wrong.” Celestia sighed. “When Starswirl cast it, Meadowbrook had found the Staff of Marking already. He wasn’t able to convince her to use it, because she was absolutely certain that Rockhoof’s mark was her own… and since they were both earth ponies, that wasn’t as obviously absurd as, say, Mistmane thinking she had lived Flash Magnus’s life.”

I had no idea who any of these ponies were and I didn’t care. “Is there a point somewhere in this?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I’m rambling. I am a rather old mare now, after all.” She smiled again. “Starswirl used it himself to switch back their cutie marks before they went insane. It seems that the spell, as constructed, doesn’t actually swap special talents. It only makes ponies think that they have the special talent associated with some other pony’s cutie mark.”

“Went insane?” I raised an eyebrow.

“Yes. Surely you remember this? Feeling the presence of a special talent that you don’t actually have, turning your back on the talent you do have, with false memories to boot… that will drive a pony mad, if it lasts long enough. But I’m confident it won’t come to that.”

I nodded. “Right. Because if Twilight messes this up you can use that staff to put everything back.”

“Oh. Oh, I thought you realized, Discord. I don’t have any idea where the staff is.”

A wave of wholly unexpected rage swept over me. “What?” My magic was making my eyeballs burn – literally. It wasn’t painful, they were just on fire. With an effort I quashed that. “You’re going to risk Fluttershy’s sanity if Twilight messes this up, just so Twilight can become an alicorn?”

She looked up at me, her own eyebrows lifted. “No, Discord. This is why I let you out of stone, among other reasons. You are my backup if Twilight fails.”

“Have you forgotten?” Luna snapped. “I remember too well the times you took a pony’s cutie mark from them, or changed them about and made them falsely believe they’d lived another pony’s life, just as Starswirl’s failed spell did. Don’t tell me you have forgotten the monstrous things you did!”

“It is a little hypocritical of you to be so upset at the thought of Fluttershy facing insanity, after all the ponies you drove insane for amusement,” Celestia said, “but I understand what it is to have a friend, and prioritize her above any other pony.”

Uh. Well. That tracked with the stuff Discord had done in the episodes I saw. Making Big Mac think he was a dog, making Granny Smith think she was young and athletic enough to dance wildly… plus, of course, what he’d done to the Mane 6. “You’re placing a lot of faith in me,” I said, maybe a little more harshly than I meant. “What if I just fix Fluttershy and leave the rest of them to go mad?”

“I doubt Fluttershy would appreciate that,” Celestia said, which was true enough. “If you care about your friend, then you care about saving her from suffering… and as kind as Fluttershy is, she’d never be able to bear her friends’ suffering even if you rescued her.”

“Fine, fine.” I rolled my eyes – with muscles, not by taking them out and rolling them as dice. “I’ll be waiting in the wings to make sure Twilight doesn’t permanently ruin her friends’ lives. But that seems like a lot to risk just to make Twilight an alicorn.”

Celestia’s face stopped, the way someone who’s seriously taken aback by what you just said but is trying to hide it does. “To be an immortal princess? Like Luna and myself, with the power of all three pony races? You think that is not worth a ‘lot’?”

Inwardly I chortled. I’d gotten her to tell me what an alicorn was, without revealing that I didn’t know. And yes, that did sound like it was worth the risk, but I couldn’t admit that. So I sniffed. “Well, I suppose if you’re limited to pony-level magic, it sounds like a big deal,” I said.

“I also want you to tell me if there are any drastic imbalances in magic beyond what we’d expect. I assume you could feel Cadance’s ascension even in stone?”

Right. Princess Cadance had wings and a horn, too. So she was immortal like Luna and Celestia? But Shining Armor, without wings, probably wasn’t. Oh, that was gonna end well. “What makes you think I could feel anything? I was in stone.”

Celestia just gave me a Look. Plainly, feeling the transformation of a regular pony into an alicorn was something she was pretty sure Discord could do even in stone. “Oh, fine,” I said. “Yes, I felt it. I haven’t the foggiest idea when it happened since it’s not like I could exactly check a calendar from inside a stone prison, so it could have been the day before Chrysalis kidnapped her or a thousand years ago as far as I know, but yes.”

“Good.” Celestia’s artificial calm broke, just a little bit, and she paced away from me, and then back. “I’m sure that the girls having the wrong cutie marks will create more than a bit of chaos, but remember. Leave them that way no longer than three days. If Twilight can’t get them back to themselves in that amount of time, we can’t afford to let it go longer, or risk them going mad.”

I considered, just for a moment, admitting to Celestia that I had absolutely no idea how I – well, Discord, but as far as she knew, I – could take a pony’s cutie mark away, let alone swap them. What if I couldn’t figure out how to do it, and then Twilight couldn’t figure out how to undo it, and then Fluttershy went insane?

The problem was that I couldn’t figure out how to admit to that without risking them finding out I wasn’t the real Discord. I could get away with pleading some degree of amnesia due to my time in stone, but apparently I’d done – Discord had done – this often that Luna, at least, wouldn’t buy that I didn’t “remember” how to do it. And okay, this probably makes me a terrble friend, but I was willing to risk that I could figure out how Discord did it in time to save Fluttershy and her friends, in the unlikely circumstance that Twilight, star of the show and Element of Magic and general super nerd genius, couldn’t solve the problem. So I said, “Don’t worry. I’m sure Twilight will be up to the task! But if she’s not… I’ll be standing by waiting for the call.” I said this last while sitting at an operator’s desk from one of those old-timey commercials where they say “Operators are standing by!” and they show you a picture of women working at an old-school switchboard.

“I don’t think any part of this plan is wise, sister,” Luna said. “But I can plainly see that you are committed to this course.”

“I have to,” Celestia said. “You know what I’ve seen. You know what’s at stake.”

Reluctantly, Luna nodded. “Yes. I suppose you do have to. But I wish you’d spent time in trying to find the staff rather than relying on Discord.”

“I heard that, Luna,” I said, with one of those giant old-time cone-shaped hearing aids pressed to my ear. “Now. Is that everything? I believe I was doing something significantly more entertaining than listening to either of you.”

“Were you with Fluttershy?” Celestia smiled. It wasn’t a smirk, it was a genuine smile, but I took it as the genuine smile of someone whose clever plan worked.

“Don’t you wish you knew,” I said in my best impression of a bitchy high school girl, and then vanished.

I didn’t go back to Fluttershy’s house, though.

Maybe I was a bad enough friend that I wasn’t going to admit to Celestia that I wasn’t really Discord and didn’t know how to save my friend from insanity if Twilight messed up, but I wasn’t such a bad friend that I wasn’t going to try to figure it out. So I went to the middle of the Everfree Forest, where I was pretty sure no pony would disturb me – maybe Zecora, but she wore so much big dangly jewelry, I found it hard to imagine I wouldn’t hear her coming – and floated in the middle of an almost-vanished path, overgrown with moss and weeds but not yet with bushes and trees. Discord had the power to make things that happened in the past visible now, and I’d just used it yesterday. Could I go back as far as the original Discord’s life before stone?

I snapped my talons, thinking I want to see what happened when Discord gave a pony the wrong cutie mark.

And then I was somewhere else. Or maybe not – the middle of a thick forest of mostly wild trees could well have been the Everfree, but I was somewhen else. The play that I’d brought onto a video screen in Fluttershy’s living room had looked like, well, like someone had recorded a play with a camera, but this was more like the scene where Discord had shown Twilight a flashback from inside the palace of what he’d actually said about the Elements. It was all around me, in full three dimensional sound and color, but when I looked at myself I was a ghostly afterimage.

There was a pear tree. It might have been one of Discord’s, because it wasn’t just growing pears, it had oranges on the other side, but one side was all pears. There was a pegasus mare bucking the tree, just like Applejack does to knock the apples down, but nothing was happening except the tree shaking slightly. She had a pear for a cutie mark, but while it didn’t look any different than any other pony’s cutie mark, something about it made me feel like it was glued on. Not something I could see, but something I could feel, like I was touching the edge of the cutie mark and feeling that it was just fastened to the mare’s flank. Except I wasn’t literally touching it, or the mare.

The mare was drenched in sweat, kicking the tree hard enough that I winced in sympathy, and Discord – the original Discord – was floating a short distance away, laughing hysterically.

I frowned. I could tell the pony was in actual pain, that she was hurting herself every time she landed a blow on the tree. I could see bruising on her hoof, and a faint red crack line in the stiff skin. (Equestrian pony hooves are separate from their fetlock, like real horse hooves and unlike the cartoon, but they’re wider than real horse hooves, and they’re covered in skin. Kind of leathery, stiff skin, but skin nonetheless. Like a calloused human foot, except much more calloused than that.) I thought the cartoon antics in My Little Pony were hilarious, particularly the stunts Discord had pulled, but I’d never laughed at anything that looked like it was really painful, like when Sombra shot black crystals into Shining Armor’s horn. Discord was kinda being a dick here. I mean, yes, that’s kind of the point of the character, but I’m kind of a dick, so if I think someone’s being a dick and not funny, they’re probably being egregious about it.

The thought occurred to me: had Discord even understood pain?

I’d learned from the short while I’d had this body that it felt great, and nothing was painful. I do a pratfall onto the ground? Impact, but no pain. I jump in ice cold water? Cold, but not painful. Bang my head on a ceiling because I stood up too fast and I’m ten feet tall in a world of three-foot-tall ponies? Again, impact, but no pain. Nothing hurt. I could feel everything, I could feel things no human could feel, probably things no pony could feel… but so far, I had no evidence that I could feel pain.

Except I had felt pain. I’d spent twenty years as Eric Reese, skinny nerdy mixed-race human asshole who got beaten up a whole hell of a lot. And I’d had colds, and the flu, and fevers, and I’d twisted my ankle, and I’d stubbed my toe and hit my funny bone and banged my head and all kinds of things. Including punching a wall hard enough to smash the drywall and make my knuckles bleed. That hurt. I’d known it would hurt before I did it, I was just mad enough to do it anyway.

This pony’s face was contorted with effort, and frustration… and pain. I knew what pain felt like. Probably Discord didn’t. I hoped he didn’t. I liked the guy. I was okay with him being a dick, but if he was gonna be this bad I wanted there to be an excuse. The skin on her hoof was bruised and cracking, and she just kept kicking the tree, over and over, and Discord was just laughing.

And then he sobered up. “Oh, well enough,” he said. “This tedium of endless repetition, ‘tis not to be borne! I shall end this dullness forthwith.”

Oh, right, I thought, remembering the episode where Luna first appeared as an adult, and she talked like she was performing Shakespeare. That far back in the past, everyone must have talked like that. Discord had been on the planet, stuck in stone but hearing everything, so he’d updated his vocabulary with the times; Luna, trapped on the moon, hadn’t. Weird to hear Discord using archaic language like that, but then, John de Lancie was trained in doing Shakespeare, so it wasn’t that weird.

I watched as Discord did not snap. Instead, he reached, his talon extending out toward the pegasus mare, then gathering inward in a rather sinister-looking clawed grasping gesture. Then he pulled, and the cutie mark went flying off her flank and into his talon, where it hovered.

The mare dropped her legs mid-buck, and looked around herself. “I… where is this? Wherefore am I here? Hail and thunder! ‘Tis this the forest of Chaos?”

Discord laughed at her. “’Tis so, verily. Art thou surprised?”

“Discord!” The pegasus mare flinched, looked as if she was going to run – and then saw her cutie mark. “What – how can you – ‘tis my mark you hold there! How?”

For a moment I thought it was odd that she said you. Then I remembered my English teacher telling us that thou and you worked like tu and vous in French, where tu is used with family and friends and your employees, and anyone you’re above or equal to, but only one person at a time; vous is used for anyone considered socially above you, anyone you’re being polite or formal with, and anytime you is plural. (They offered me French or Spanish. I took French because John de Lancie apparently actually knows French; he certainly spoke more of it in Star Trek than supposedly French Picard ever did.) Apparently the pegasus was showing Discord respect.

“How else? Chaos!” Discord laughed again. “Dost thou wish its return?”

“Yes! Yes, I pray of you, please return my mark!”

“Oops.” Discord dropped it and the mark seemed to vanish. “How terribly clumsy of me! It seems I’ve lost thy precious mark. But surely it must be about here somewhere, in some wise! ‘Tis certain that if thou shouldst search, it will appear! Mayhap.”

“That is my mark! I need it!”

He shook his head. “Thinkest thou, young mare. Was thy mark truly for pears?”

“I… it must…”

“Must it?” He snapped, and her wings were draped over his lion arm. “See thou these?”

“Ah – my wings!” She lowered her head and pawed at the ground like she was going to charge. “Villain! You’ve taken my mark and now my wings? How much more will you take from me? My very life, and laugh as my lifeblood escapes?”

“Mmm, no. In death there is no humor, nor is there chaos. In ponies acting the fool and playing that they might threaten me, there is some jest, but be thou wary, there is little, and thou’st all but played it to empty.” He spun the wings around his finger. “Art thou not a pegasus? Are these not thy wings?”

“Yes! Yes to both, Tartarus take your cruelty!” She was almost sobbing at this point.

“Then answer me true, and win them back if thou darest.” He leaned forward into her face. “Why would a pegasus have a mark for bucking pear trees? ‘Tis the province of the ponies of the earth, not sky, to work the land and grow the fruit, is it not?”

“I…” Her eyes were widening. “Yes… yes, you’re right. The pear mark…” She turned and looked at the tree she was bucking. “Why was I so certain I was a farmer of pears?” And then back at her flank. “Mine own mark! Where has it gone? Have you taken it?”

He laughed again. “Mayhap.”

“Where?”

“Ah, you ponies and your need for all answers, so immediate! Hast thou never learned patience? It’s about here, somewhere. I’m certain. Mostly.” He smirked. “But dost not dare thou re-emplace the pear, shouldst thou find it. Or dost. If thou wishest to gallop forward into madness, ‘tis none of my concern.”

The pegasus started digging through the undergrowth, Discord vanished, and then so did the image. I was frustrated. The image had shown me Discord taking a cutie mark that hadn’t belonged to the pony who had it, and presumably he was the one who’d swapped it, but it hadn’t shown what happened when the pony got it back. Had he somehow turned it solid, so she could pick it up and put it on her body? He had warned her not to put the pear back, after all.

I told my powers, Show me what happened when the mare found her cutie mark.

Nothing happened. I got a vague, wispy sense of a shrug, and that was it.

So… Discord hadn’t been paying attention when she got it? Maybe I could only see what Discord had been present for? …except I had most definitely not been present for the performance of Love Like Feathers. The other possibility… was that she’d never gotten it back. That Discord had swapped her cutie mark with some other pony’s, just to be a dick, and then removed the wrong one before she went insane… but never gave her back the correct one.

Show me what happened when Discord gave a pony back their correct cutie mark.

Shrug.

That did not seem promising.

Show me what happens when a pony loses their cutie mark completely.

And I was looking at a town of roughly built houses that were all built on the same plan, painted the same way, just… built badly. I mean, I’m not exactly an architect, but some of those houses looked like I could have done a better job with Legos, and a more comfortable one too. There were ponies seated in a circle around a pinkish pony – well, purplish-pinkish, I don’t know what that color is, I never got a whole box of 64 Crayola crayons for my own – with toothpaste hair, if the toothpaste was grape-flavored dark purple except for the minty swirls of turquoise. Sorry, not hair, mane. I needed to remember that. All of the ponies were smiling broadly, and to my mind, very very insincerely. Like, there’s customer service smile, and then there’s sarcastic “some asshole social worker just told you to smile”, and this was somewhere between those. Like just on the border of plausible deniability of insolence.

“Hello, friends!” the toothpaste-maned pony said. “Let’s begin our morning with a song today!”

I blinked – the sun was rising behind them, which it definitely was not doing where I was – and then remembered that as far as I knew Discord could only look into the past. Maybe I could look into the present too, but I didn’t yet know how.

All the ponies stood up – there were about eleven or twelve of them – and began to sing a song about how much they loved living in their town, free to be whatever they wished, without a guiding destiny. Their singing was surprisingly terrible given that this was My Little Pony and ponies seemed to drop into song at the fall of a horsehair. All of their cutie marks were equal signs.

This disturbed me. They felt – empty. Like, ok, ponies appear to me in three dimensions, not the two dimensions of the cartoon. They look “real”, for a value of real that’s almost more real than the reality I came from. If someone had taken a cartoon pony from the show and stuck it in this world, it would have looked flat and, well, cartoony. The equal sign cutie marks didn’t look any more cartoony than anyone else’s cutie mark, but they felt cartoony. They felt every bit as stapled on as the pear cutie mark, but worse. The pear cutie mark had felt like… I don’t know how to describe it. Like a scab. Not a natural part of the pony, something you could definitely feel was stuck on, but stuck on hard, like it was a part of the skin. It had felt like I could easily rip it off, but that it would have solidity and weight if I did. These felt like they were made of cardboard and taped to the ponies. They looked real to my eyes, but they felt incredibly fake.

Oddly enough, the only one who felt real was the turquoise pony. Her equal sign felt like an actual cutie mark was there on her flank. Maybe she had some power to rip off pony cutie marks and replace them with copies of her own?

I thought of the Borg, from Star Trek, assimilating everything they could find. I thought of Camazotz, from A Wrinkle In Time, where the monstrous IT transformed an entire society into a nightmare of conformity. And I watched ponies dance badly and sing badly, things I didn’t actually know ponies could do badly, with giant fake smiles plastered on their faces, and I wondered how long ago this had happened, and if Celestia had known about it, because this looked like some kind of Story of the Blanks level bullshit.

The ponies didn’t seem insane; they finished their song and then went off to do daily tasks. It was pretty obvious from the barely controlled faces they were making that the baker was absolute crap at her job and the muffins they were forcing themselves to eat were… maybe not on the level of Pinkie Pie’s baked bads, but definitely awful. A group of ponies went off to try to build another house. None of them were earth ponies, and neither of the two unicorns in the group seemed to be strong enough to lift the building materials with their magic. Toothpaste Mane called out encouragement to them.

I dispelled the vision. It was depressing, but it wasn’t like I could do anything about it -- it was probably from a long time ago -- and it confirmed that ponies without cutie marks weren’t crazy. They just weren’t any good at anything. So if it came to it, I could save Fluttershy and her friends by removing their cutie marks, whereupon they’d be bad at everything, but alive and not crazy, and the fact that Discord had treated the pear cutie mark as if it was an object he could hold suggested that I, at least, could manipulate them like they were physical objects. Maybe I could just stick them onto the correct flanks, like I was a little girl decorating a notebook with stickers, and they’d just stay there? Maybe I’d have to let Twilight figure it out, but at least she’d have more time to do it.

Good enough. I knew how to remove the mismatched cutie marks if I had to, and I knew that would protect Fluttershy and her friends from going insane. If I ended up needing to go that far… I’d burn that bridge when I came to it.

Time to go back and hang out with Fluttershy!

Author's Note

Slowly but surely I'm trying to reclaim my life and my writing time. No promises though.