Game Over
Twilight stared at her friends. Something was seriously wrong with them, but she couldn't imagine what.
Applejack wouldn't talk. She'd admitted that she could talk, she just wouldn't. Rarity had plainly gone insane – not only did she think that boulder on her back was a diamond, but her aggression toward her friends was ludicrous even if it had been a diamond. In her right mind, Rarity would know better than to think her friends wanted to take her gem, and she'd know better than to try to take the gem during a national crisis, and she'd recognize that if she found the gem in the Canterlot hedge maze, it was either a magical creation or it belonged to Princess Celestia. And Fluttershy, who had shown great reluctance out of fear but at least had been willing to move forward with the rest of them, now showed no further sign of fear and yet was constantly trying to suggest that they quit.
Twilight knew of no spells that could do this, and right now it wasn't as if she could exactly head back to her library and research it. All she could think to do was to redouble her efforts to find Choco and Rainbow. Hopefully she could get to them in time, before Eris had a chance to do whatever weird thing to them that she'd done to the others.
She breathed heavily. This boulder was so heavy.
The hedge maze was giving Choco an incredible sense of déjà vu, which was odd, because he was quite certain he'd never been here before. He'd been homeschooled on the rock farm, and self-taught after he'd gotten his cutie mark and fled to Ponyville, so he'd never had the opportunity to go on one of the field trips schoolfoals seemed to be perpetually going on, at least if he listened to Rarity's complaints about the frequency. He'd been to Canterlot a few times, on business or for the Gala or that ceremony of thanks that Celestia had held for them after they'd banished Nightmare Moon and restored Princess Luna, but the Canterlot Gardens had always inexplicably creeped him out. Too neat, the sculptured lines of hedge too precise and clean. It bothered him. And the statues. Most of the time statues didn't bother him, but when he'd caught a glimpse of the statues in the Gardens at the Gala, he'd started having flashbacks to his recurring nightmare of being turned to stone. Which hadn't helped his mood any and had probably contributed to Prince Bluenose's chocolatification later that evening. He'd wanted to join Fluttershy because he wanted to spend time with Fluttershy, but he'd let his ambition to sell chocolates to the nobles and acquire a patron win out, and part of the reason had been that the Gardens unnerved him. So there was no way he could possibly have gone as far as the hedge maze, ever.
And yet. The twists and turns seemed so eerily familiar. And Eris' plan seemed so self-evident. Spirit of Discord, another name for Disharmony. Breaking ties between ponies would be a natural talent, and the Elements of Harmony only worked because they all worked together, on the power of friendship. She would be out to turn friends against each other. So, he just wouldn't let her. No matter what she threw at him, he knew better than to let her drive a wedge between him and his friends.
The sound of a "boom" surprised him. He turned, and saw fireworks exploding, over the next hedge. His cutie mark, the symbol of high energy celebrations and fun (and, though he didn't admit it when he told other ponies about his cutie mark, just a touch of danger.) Obviously she was trying to lure him in, making him think there was a party or a celebration going on. Grimly, Choco considered his options. He could just go the other way, ignoring the fireworks, but something told him Eris wasn't going to let anypony ignore her. Better to confront her, make her see that he wouldn't fall for her games. He pushed through the hedge.
He was in an improbably large arena-like area, with streamers and dancing wacky-waving-foreleg-ponies flailing their balloon-like forelimbs, tables covered with sweets and hors d'oeuvres, and fireworks going off in the center against the backdrop of a grey-clouded, dimly lit sky. "Nice," he said, looking around himself as he trotted forward. "I'll say this for you, Eris, you can throw a decent party. If, you know, you'd bothered to invite anypo—" Abruptly he tripped on something he was certain hadn't been there a moment ago, and fell face forward into a mud puddle. The sound of laughter rang out, as if a dozen or more ponies were laughing at his misfortune. He looked up, pushing the mud out of his eyes with his forehoof. The firework displays remained hovering in the air, not dispersing as fireworks should, and they were forming into faces – laughing, mocking faces.
Choco scowled, hard. For a moment he forgot his resolution to stand up to whatever she could throw at him. "Shut up!" he yelled at the faces. "Stop laughing!"
And Eris appeared in a flash of light. "Ooo, what's the matter, Choco? Don't you like it when you can make others laugh?"
Choco got to his feet. "Not when they're laughing at me, no."
"But your friends laugh at you all the time, so how is this different?"
"Nice try." He smiled at her thinly. "Most of the time, my friends are laughing with me. And when they're laughing at me, it's generally because I've done something dumb that's worth laughing at, but it's all right because they're my friends. Friends can poke a little fun at you if they want, because you know it's not malicious."
"You're suuuuure about that?" she asked with lips pursed in an almost-pout, drawing out the word "sure" like she knew something he didn't.
"I know your game, Eris," he said. "You want to turn me against my friends."
She giggled. "Very good, Choco! Have a gold star!" She reached into the sky and pulled down the sun, throwing the world into shadow and nearly blinding Choco as she held a now-miniaturized sun out to him. "Woo, that's hot! I should have used oven mitts!" Now she had a pink and purple checked oven mitts on the paw that held the sun. "Come on! Don't you want your gold star?"
"Somehow I think that even with oven mitts, that particular gold star would be too hot for me to handle," Choco said. "How about you put that one back and give me a sticker, like the kind they have in the schoolhouse?"
Eris laughed again and snapped her talon, and the sun reappeared in the sky. "You sure do know a lot!"
"Yes, I do. Now if you'll excuse me, I have Elements to find. Unless you're planning to cheat at your own game and interfere with me?"
"Me? Cheat?" Eris sucked in a mock-horrified breath, paws pressed to her chest. "Never!" She coiled in the air, snaking around his head. "I do wonder, though, why you're okay with those mares laughing at you but not anypony else."
Choco sighed. "Nopony likes to be laughed at, but I grew up on a rock farm in the middle of nowhere. I've been through my share of embarrassing moments where ponies mocked me because of something I didn't know, and believe me, I can give as good as I got. Besides, all laughter is mockery when it comes right down to it; you just have to pick your targets, depending on your audience. Laughing at and laughing with are close enough if the ponies like you, and if they don't, you can turn laughing at to laughing with quickly enough by giving it right back to the ones mocking you."
"I see. I see." Eris was dressed in a labcoat with glasses, eagerly taking notes. "So the really important part is whether the ponies who are laughing are your friends or not?"
"Yes, or at least if they're inclined to be friendly to you."
"And making them laugh wins them over, so that they'll become friendly?"
He glared in her face. "If you're trying to develop a scientific understanding of comedy, I must warn you, I've been through this with Twilight. It's impossible to explain comedy with science. Once you dissect a joke it isn't funny anymore."
"So wouldn't you say that ponies are only your friends so long as you can make them laugh?"
That stung, a bit. Choco drew his head back, away from her. "I wouldn't say that, no."
"Because it hurts to admit to it. Doesn't it, Choco." Now she had an expression of faux sympathy on her long face. "But you can admit it to me. I know all about it!"
"What are you talking about?"
"The fact that you don't have any friends." Her head came forward again, her eyes boring directly into his. "Oh, you say they're your friends, you pretend as hard as you can, but you know the truth deep down inside. Nopony really likes you, Choco. They put up with you because you make them laugh. And the moment you stop being funny, they'll drop you like a hot potato. Ooch! Hot hot hot!" A hot potato manifested in Eris' paw, and she promptly dropped it with a faked cry. "Someday I'll remember the oven mitts first..."
Part of him wanted to laugh at her antics, but the rest of him was too busy being offended – and unnerved. "That's not true. My friends like me!"
"They really don't, though," Eris said. "Did they ever invite you to a sleepover?"
"I'm a stallion."
"Uh-huh. You're different, and you know you'll always be different. You like arguments. You like mean jokes. You can barely bring yourself to obey the law, let alone all the silly rules ponies are supposed to obey about being friends! You don't see things the way they do, and they know it."
"But – no." Choco pulled his face away, trying to avoid her eyes. "They're – they're still my friends, anyway..."
"They need you to power the Elements of Harmony and be part of Princess Celestia's super secret superweapon," Eris said. "So they have to pretend."
"That's not true!" Behind him, he could hear the fireworks, still floating in the air, continuing to laugh hysterically. "They are my friends!"
"But you didn't have any friends before," Eris said. "You've been alone your whole life. Why would they be different?"
He tried to hold onto memories that contradicted her. The Cakes... but the Cakes had just wanted him for cheap labor. His family... but his parents had spent all their time punishing him for his rebellions and transgressions, and two of his sisters had gotten him into trouble every time they saw him do something Father wouldn't like, which was everything, and Maud had told him, quite seriously, that he didn't belong to the family and that fae creatures had obviously put him here in place of the sibling that should have been. The citizens of Ponyville... but they'd been so quick to laugh at him when his inadequate rock farmer's education had caught up with him and he hadn't known about some celebration or some custom civilized ponies engaged in. He'd had allies, useful ponies who had helped him here or there, but had he really ever had friends, before that fateful Summer Sun Celebration and the festivities he'd needed Twilight's help to organize?
Eris' eyes were so blue. So very, very blue, like deep pools of water, like whirlpools pulling him down. Choco struggled. "N-no... they're different. They... they care..."
"They don't," Eris said bluntly. "You're really not a very nice pony, Choco. Nopony actually likes you. Not even Fluttershy. She's just too kind to say so."
"But... Fluttershy..." He loved Fluttershy. How could she not even like him?
The vista of his life opened up behind him in bleaker, darker colors than he could ever remember seeing it, and yet, it felt right. Horrible, but true. He had no friends. He had never had any friends. He wasn't a good pony.
"All they care about is you being funny," Eris whispered, and it was as if it was his own mind whispering it to him, a truth he could no longer deny. "The moment you aren't funny anymore... they'll forget you exist. Completely."
Alone. Unloved, unliked, ignored. In his minds' eye, he spoke to ponies, and they walked right past him, as if he wasn't even there. He tried to offer them bits to buy things, and they ignored him, and when he acted out to demand that they pay attention, they chased him from their shops with a broom.
"Everything you think you have, you stole," he heard Eris saying, from very far away. "None of it's for you. You never deserved any of it. And if ponies knew what you really are, they'd hate you."
And then he heard Twilight's voice, gratingly cheerful. "Choco! Are we glad to see you!"
"Oh, you are, huh?" Choco turned to face her, and grinned savagely. "Need a good laugh? Is that it?"
"Uh... no..."
"Because I'm always up for a good joke!" He laughed, piercingly, grabbing Applejack's hat off her head and twirling it on one hoof while he stood on the other.
Applejack gave him a dirty look, and pantomimed him returning the hat. "What's the matter, Applejack? Cat got your tongue? Oh, I forgot, you're more of a dog pony, aren't you? Well, if you love dogs so much, why don't you fetch!" He tossed the hat over a nearby hedge.
"Choco, what's gotten into you?" Twilight demanded.
"I think we should all just go home and have a nice cup of tea," Fluttershy said. "That's sure to make us all feel better."
"As if I'd go to your home!" Rarity shrilled. "You'd put something in the tea to make me fall asleep so you can take my beautiful Tom for yourself!"
"You named it Tom?" Twilight said skeptically, raising an eyebrow.
Choco chortled loudly. "Beautiful? Oh, Rarity, I think you need to get your eyes checked! If that hunk of worthless granite is beautiful, I'd hate to see what your latest fashions look like! Maybe the newest style is garbage bags and lint?"
"That's it! Come here so I can punch you!"
"Ooh, but Rarity, that's not ladylike at all! But come on, go ahead!" He darted next to her, and then away as she tried to swing at him, causing the large boulder to teeter precariously on her back, tipping off Twilight's and nearly crushing Rarity. "Oh, what a shame, you missed me!"
"You absolutely should take that gem home right now, Rarity," Fluttershy said. "Right this minute. You wouldn't want anything to happen to it!"
"Fluttershy, she can't leave now!" Twilight said. "If anyone stops playing, we forfeit!"
"Would that really be so bad? It's gotten so dim outside, how can we even see the Elements if they're here? I vote we come back tomorrow."
Applejack returned with her hat, leaves and twigs all throughout her mane and tail. She was ignoring him. Choco felt a sudden wild fury. Ignore him, would she? He wasn't funny enough for her, was he? Oh, he'd show her some funny. He'd show her funny she couldn't possibly ignore. "Hey, Applejack! Tickle attack!"
Choco was an earth stallion, with the enhanced strength of all earth ponies. Applejack was stronger than he was – bucking trees built up a lot more muscle than making chocolates – but he had a much better instinct for finding weak points. He tackled Applejack, landing on her back and driving her to the ground, and when she rolled under him to get her hooves in position to buck him off, he pinned her forelegs and used his nose and beard to tickle her in the joints between her barrel and forelegs, mercilessly. Applejack snorted, and struggled, biting her lip. "You're not laughing, Applejack? Why not? Am I not funny enough for you?"
"That's enough!" Twilight might only be a unicorn mare – without a horn, which made her useless – but she knew leverage, too; a buck in just the right place, and Choco went sideways off Applejack, allowing his victim to use her superior strength to free herself and pin him down. "All of you, knock it off! We need to find Rainbow Dash right away, before she turns as weird as the rest of you!"
"Oh, I'm weird now?" Choco panted. "Give it to me straight, Twilight, tell me how you really feel!"
"Yes, you are most definitely weird," Rarity snapped. "Tickling a mare, in public! How uncouth! If I didn't have to protect my lovely gem here, I would teach you a lesson you'd never forget!"
"Let's find Rainbow Dash and then go home," Fluttershy said. "It looks like it's going to rain! And there isn't even any rain scheduled for today! Maybe it would be chocolate rain, Choco, you'll definitely want to be home to get some buckets!"
"As if I think you actually care what I want," Choco snapped.
"Applejack, please, say something," Twilight pleaded. "Help me control this madhouse."
Applejack shrugged, and started walking. "Everypony, follow Applejack!" Twilight shouted. "Let's find Rainbow, now!"
As Rainbow Dash zipped through the maze, hiding behind shrubbery and charging forward at full speed once the coast was clear, she saw a cloud... shooting bolts of rainbow lightning. She grinned. "I've got you now, element," she said to herself, giving chase.
She followed the cloud into a clearing... only to run smack into Eris, who grabbed her in a hug. "DASHIE! I knew you'd find me!"
Rainbow swung at the draconequus' exposed jaw, but Eris pushed her away before her hoof could connect, causing Rainbow to fall to the ground, since she didn't have her wings. "I guess I'm It now? I'll cover my eyes and count to twenty, and you go hide!"
"This isn't a game!" Rainbow shouted at her. She reared up and made punching motions with her forehooves. "You'd better tell me where you hid the Elements, or I'm gonna knock the bats straight outta your belfry!"
Eris's eyes got big. "Oh, but Dashie, I've got something really important to tell you! Really really important! Like, supercalifragilisticexpialadociously important!"
"Yeah, I got something important to tell you too! Like POW, right in the kisser!"
"No, really!" And suddenly Eris' face was in hers, and her forehooves were being held in the draconequus' talon and lion paw, with strength sufficient that Rainbow couldn't tear loose and punch her. "You gotta listen to me. Cloudsdale is gonna fall, and you're the only pegasus awesome enough to stop it!"
The news shocked Rainbow enough to make her stop struggling. "That... that doesn't make any sense! How can Cloudsdale fall?"
Eris let her go. "I don't know, I didn't do it. Maybe nopony drank the cola I gave them and now it's too heavy to stay up! That's not important. What's important is that they need you to save them!"
"But..." Rainbow twisted her head. Looking at the draconequus was making her feel dizzy for some reason. "My friends... we've gotta find the Elements!"
Eris hung her head. "Oh, I know, you wanna stick by your friends... but Dashie, you and I know the truth." Eris sidled up to her, one paw on her back and her head looking down at Rainbow as the rest of her body floated above. "They'll just drag you down," Eris said conspiratorially. "You're the awesome one... and you're the one Cloudsdale needs right now. Your friends can get by without you for once. Not like you aren't always bailing them out the rest of the time, right?"
"They need me..." But when she looked into Eris' eyes, she saw panicked, terrified pegasi flying desperately out of the way as the pillars and cloud formations of Cloudsdale collapsed around them. "But... Cloudsdale? Fall... without me? No!"
"Cloudsdale needs you more than your friends do, right now," Eris said. "If they're good friends, they'll understand!"
Rainbow stumbled backward, dizzily. "Yeah, I... I gotta... wait a minute, how do I know you're telling the truth?"
"I promise you this, Dashie," Eris said. "If you can go and save it, Cloudsdale will be absolutely safe. You know you're awesome enough to do it!"
"Yeah... yeah, I am... okay. Cloudsdale, I'm on my way!" She started to charge off.
"Wait!" Eris teleported in front of her, a paw held up. "You're gonna need these!" She held up Rainbow's wings in her talon.
Rainbow snatched at them, and in a split second, felt their sinew and muscle and the magic flowing around them, attached to her again. For a second, she remembered something Eris had said about forfeits... but Cloudsdale was a city of thousands of pegasi. She had to be loyal to her home right now; her home needed her more. Equestria needed her to save Cloudsdale more than it needed her to help find the Elements.
She lifted off without a backward glance, making a beeline for Cloudsdale.
Down on the ground, Eris looked up at her. "And if Cloudsdale was really falling, you really would have been awesome enough to save it, I bet," she said softly. "You made the right choice, Dashie. You weren't really disloyal at all. Just... kind of gullible!" Eris giggled. "Well, that's all that. Onward to Stage 2! Or are we on 3? I don't know, I wasn't really counting!"
Twilight was carrying Tom for Rarity again, by herself this time, staggering under the weight. Choco was continuing to be a jerk, Applejack was continuing to be silent, Rarity was continuing to be insanely possessive, and Fluttershy was continuing to suggest that they quit, every chance she got. There was only one thought Twilight was focused on, one thing that kept her going as she trudged through the maze with a giant boulder on her back. "Must... find... Rainbow Dash. As a team... we're unstoppable. Rainbow Dash won't let us down."
Choco giggled. "Well, hey, I guess they don't make loyalty like they used to! Look who's flying off!"
"That's not a funny joke, Choco," Twilight snapped, but looked up anyway, shrugging Tom off her back. To her horror, she saw that Rainbow was indeed flying off. Abandoning them. "No!" she gasped. "How can it be?"
Dark clouds rolled in, making the dim sky even darker. The ground shook, lightning flashed, and the hedges toppled over, leaves and twigs turning into bugs that scampered off to the tune of Rarity shrieking, until there was nothing left but a huge, dusty, empty plain where the hedge maze had been, surrounded by the garden. Eris emerged out of the dust, grinning manically.
"Guess what? Guess what? You'll never guess! Come on, guess!" Eris shrilled, bouncing on an invisible trampoline, bounding all around them, switching randomly from a bipedal to a quadrepal stance as she bounced, sometimes even bouncing on her coiled tail as if it were a spring. "Come on, Twilight! Guess!"
"What," Twilight said flatly.
Eris giggled hysterically. "Somepony broke the 'no wings' rule and the 'everypony has to play' rule!" She snapped her talon, and Twilight felt a sudden surge of power and the sensation of her horn back on top of her head. Fluttershy's wings were back, as was Rarity's horn. "That means the game's over, and I won!"
"Oh, goody! Now we can go home!" Fluttershy said.
"Whoopee! Let's go hide under our beds and pretend everything is okay!" Choco said, laughing harshly. "That'll solve everything!"
Twilight looked around herself in despair. Now that she had her horn, she could see that her friends had changed. When she lit her horn, she could "see" patterns of magic, dimly, overlaid over reality. It was a form of synesthesia that many powerful unicorns had – most unicorns could merely feel magic with their horn, but mages could usually see or have some other secondary sense involved. Her friends looked normal enough to her eyesight, but when she lit her horn and started seeing magic, their colors changed. Rarity's vivid mane, tail and cutie mark had dulled in hue, turning almost a blue-gray. Choco, whose neck was usually gray, had visibly dimmed all over, his black mane and goatee and his brown coat still visibly black and brown, but much dimmer shades of those colors. Fluttershy's yellow and pink had dulled in saturation but increased in brightness; they weren't grey, they were lighter, more pastel colors, but despite being colors that by nature should be washed out, they were almost painfully bright to look at, as if she shone with her inner magic, and Rarity's and Choco's inner magic had gone dull. Somehow. Applejack had turned a much paler orange, and her mane had dulled in hue, approaching gray. But none of them looked any different at all to her eye – well, aside from the fact that Rarity was still filthy.
"I have an idea!" Choco was saying. "Why don't we cut up Rarity's big rock into six pieces and make new Elements out of it? I'll bet they'll be as useful as the old ones have proven to be!"
"Hee-yah!" Rarity bucked Choco in the side, sending him flying. "Just try it, you ruffian! He's mine, all mine!"
Applejack got between the two of them as Choco tried to charge back at Rarity, on her hind legs with her forelegs out to separate them. Rarity sneered. "Oh, does Little Miss Silent have something she wants to express to us?" she asked.
"There's a frog in her throat," Choco said. "If she opens her mouth, the only thing that will come out is 'Ribbit, ribbit.'"
Eris floated around the group, giggling. "Heeheehee! You ponies are just so funny!"
"But – this isn't fair!" Twilight said. "How were we supposed to win when you're rigging the game, Eris?"
"I'm rigging the game?" Eris raised an eyebrow. "Hi there! I'm Eris, the spirit of disharmony and chaos! Have you met me?"
"How are we supposed to find the Elements of Harmony when you took away the labyrinth before we could get to the end?"
"Um, forfeit? I win? Game over? And anyway, why did you think the Elements were in the labyrinth?"
"But you said—"
"I said think of the most twisty idea you can think! A labyrinth's a twisty place, not a twisty idea!"
"Ha! I knew it! You were wrong the whole time, Twilight," Choco said. "I knew they weren't in the labyrinth!"
Twilight stared at him. "Then why didn't you say so?"
"Oh, you'd never listen to me. I'm Choco Pie, team clown! Did you listen to me about Rainbow's griffin pal? No! Did you listen to me about the parasprites? No! Did you listen to me about the exploding marshmallow fluff fountains? No!"
"That sounds like a great idea!" Eris said. "Exploding marshmallow fluff fountains for everypony!"
"Oh, yay," Fluttershy said, clapping her hooves and acting as if she was trying to cheer, except that her "yay" was barely above her usual hardly audible speaking tone.
"So then where are they?" Twilight demanded.
"I'm sorry, I thought we just covered this!" Eris said. "Do I look like the 'spirit of giving away the answers'? Huh? Do I?" She patted Twilight on the head. "I'll give you a hint, though... " She broke into song, dancing with a microphone in hand, hanging on lampposts that hadn't been there previously and jumping on boxes that had been equally nonexistent. "'E is for Eris, that's what they're calling me, E is for Evil, that's what I've got to be, E is for Everypony's gonna play with me, End it Bend it Friend it has an E!'"
"What?" Twilight stared, bewildered. "What is that supposed to mean?"
"Maybe the magic of friendship will help you figure it out!" Eris said. "Or maybe you could research it! I don't know where you could find any information, though, it's not like you live in a library!" She put her paws to her mouth. "Gasp! You do live in a library!" She giggled. "Anyways, I've got chaos to make, ponies to confuse, so I gotta go! See ya back in Ponyville! It's going to be so much fun when I get through with it!"
She vanished in a flash of light.
Twilight looked around at her friends again, her despair deepening. Choco and Rarity were alternating between insulting each other and Applejack. Applejack looked utterly despondent but still refused to talk. Fluttershy was incongruously happy, singing little songs and skipping around. And more cotton candy clouds rolled over their heads, drenching all of them in cold chocolate milk.
"Twisty idea..." she whispered to herself. "Twist, rotation, loop... loop? Back to where we started! That would be a twist... but would that be the Castle of the Two Sisters, or the library, or... well, it doesn't matter! Eris said go research it in the library, maybe her stupid song has a clue in it!" She stood up straighter. "Guys! We have to go back to Ponyville! I think Eris' 'twisty idea' is that we have to loop back on ourselves, which would mean Ponyville or the Everfree, and I know I've got books in the library I can use to research this!"
"Oh, no, Twilight, that's a terrible idea!" Fluttershy said. "You were without your horn for so long. Now if you try reading books you're going to give yourself a terrible migraine!"
"No, I'm not," Twilight said.
Fluttershy made a stern face at her. "I think I know more about medicine than you do, Twilight."
"Well, I for one am eager to return home, secure Tom safely, and take a long, luxurious bath with him," Rarity said. "I know he's as eager to get this horrid dust off and let his true beauty shine as I am!"
"That is going to take a lot of scrubbing," Choco said. "For both of you."
"I will hurt you."
"What're you going to do, throw Tom at me?"
"Let's just get home, everypony," Twilight said. "Come on."
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That comment about Maud was heartbreaking.
... Wow. That was spectacular mental trickery from Eris. I almost want her in the show instead of Discord.
Also, the image of the story is glitching out for me. Anybody else having this problem?
I really like what Eris did to choco. That was great.
Is Choco gonna become a draconeequs ?
Yeah, Eris has a lot of resentment to take out on Choco. Still, going by the additional hints, she may be trying to help Twilight as much as she can. In any case, this continues to be fascinating. I especially like the different saturation and brightness settings to go along with the different personality alterations.
I want this in the show. Greater and more rational thought processing, more believable persona changes, and a better 'villain'.
Bravo Alara. And you didn't take even a month to update. Such high quality is why I read your stuff. But this speed is actually impressive for the sheer quality.
6778458
I am like a race car. I spend most of my time doing nothing, I'm very high maintenance, but when I actually start my engines I'm incredibly fast. I just can't keep up the pace.
For years I've been struggling to figure out how to maintain; if I could write for 1 hour every single day I'd do half a million words in a year. As it is, this year I came close to a quarter million. But there were months I didn't write at all.
6774439 I was thinking the same thing. Choco's relationship with Ma and Pa Pie, and Limestone, are not that surprising. Maud telling Choco basically that he's a mistake and she wishes he had never been born is rather depressing and hearbreaking, given how close Maud is to Pinkie.
The fact that two of his three sisters were always tattling to Cloudy and Igneous is throwing me off, though. Clearly Limestone is one of them (you know Choco has done some awful things to Holder's Boulder). But who is the other one? Marble Pie seemed extremely similar to Fluttershy to me, and Pinkie seemed protective of her. Given Choco's own feelings for Fluttershy, I would guess Choco was protective and considerate towards Marble, even if he wasn't considerate towards anyone else. On the other hand, the way the sentence is structured, it makes it sounds like 2 of his sisters tattled on him, plus Maud who didn't care about him except to tell him he's a changling (in the traditional, non-MLP sense), which by process of elimination would mean quiet little Marble is snitching on her twin brother.
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You have to remember, Choco is not Pinkie. Pinkie was a good girl. She was bored out of her mind on the rock farm, and depressed, and always trying to find a way to sneak in some sort of fun, but she didn't disobey. She worked hard at the jobs she hated, she paid lip service to her parents' beliefs even though she wasn't sure she agreed, and while she wasn't a very good rock farmer, and it was largely because she hated it, it wasn't like she was trying to do a bad job. She would space out from boredom a lot, but when brought back to earth and reminded of her work, she'd try to do it.
Choco, in our world, would have been diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder. He only takes orders from ponies he respects (Celestia and Twilight both fall in this category, as does Fluttershy, though Fluttershy doesn't generally give him orders per se), and he didn't particularly respect his parents because he didn't agree with their belief system. He has a habit of flouting authority because it is authority. He argues, and talks back, and refuses jobs he doesn't like. So he was a holy terror on the rock farm. None of his siblings feel for him the pure, unresentful love they feel for Pinkie because while he was on the rock farm, he took every opportunity possible to shirk his duties and pass them off on his sisters, or deliberately do a job badly so his parents would stop asking him, in which case it also fell on his sisters. He also threw a lot of temper tantrums, some of which involved throwing rocks (not at ponies, but on a rock farm, you do not pick up the rocks and throw them, not at anything.)
Finally, Eris is making him remember all the negative things, twisting his recollections so happier moments don't come to mind when he tries. The Cakes did not treat him as a source of free labor -- they had great affection for him, and still do, it's just that he was a terrible employee. Though not in the same way he was terrible on the rock farm. Choco was the kind of employee who thinks he's a full partner in the business, and who makes decisions that he's just not authorized to make. He had the best interests of the bakery at heart and he was trying to do a good job, but he did things like rearrange the interior layout without permission, or use the company expense account to buy costly equipment for creating a line of goods that the Cakes already knew they didn't want to branch into. (Example: The Cakes do not make homemade ice cream. They do serve ice cream, but they buy it, because making ice cream isn't their specialty and there are only so many hours in a day. Choco bought ice cream making equipment and expensive unicorn spellwork to shelter part of the kitchen from the rest of it, temperature-wise, so ice cream could be made. He was not authorized to do this, and his efforts to make ice cream interfered with his bakery duties. So even though the ice cream was good and it sold, they lost money on it, and Choco was resistant to giving up on it.)
It is likely that what Maud said was either said in a moment of extreme anger -- just because Maud doesn't show emotions on her face or in her voice doesn't mean she doesn't feel them, and Choco could rile anypony up to extreme anger -- or was a joke that Choco took wrong because it hit too close to home. Maud was not nearly as loving to Choco as she was to Pinkie, because Choco was much more derisive of what she loved (and to be fair to Choco, he was working on a rock farm when he had a phobia of rocks, so being really sarcastic and dismissive of rocks was a form of self-protection), but she did love him, as did the others. They just weren't nearly as nice to him as they were to Pinkie because Choco was a much bigger jerk than Pinkie ever was. (If you don't think small children are likely to be sarcastic and derisive toward the things their older siblings loved, you have been fortunate never to meet anyone like my brother.)
So his life at home wasn't as horrible and loveless as Eris is making him remember, nor was his time with the Cakes. She found an insecurity and hammered at it as hard as she could. If Choco had been up against a chaotic draconequus who didn't know him as well, he might very well have been able to resist the way Fluttershy did, but Eris knows his weak points.
6784973 Interesting. Pinkie is many things, but she has never been lazy, and hard work is kind of the #1 priority on a farm. Discord on the other hand, is definitely incredibly lazy at anything he doesn't actively enjoy. Good to know Maud wasn't just casually slagging her brother.
It also kind of hints at Eris's own motivations here. I'm not sure if Discord tricked Pinkie, or if he made some kind of bet with her, or even if this switcharoo was initially Pinkie's idea, but clearly Pinkie is not happy with the situation right now. And from her point of view, Discord made a version of her parents and siblings miserable for years, so it makes sense she would come off as a lot crueler to Discord than she has to everyone else.
By contrast, I assumed Eris was exaggerating about the Cakes, since we got Choco's perspective on them in the first chapter.
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Don't think she killed them. In Equestria, creatures fall from heights without injury all the time -- she wasn't taking out all the birds flying high overhead, just the ones in the garden. They also probably weren't permanently crippled; chaos magic tends to not be permanent.
That being said, some birds perched in trees are going to have a hell of a time getting down.
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It depends on how Equestria understands being a transsexual to work -- if they think of it as your spirit being born into the wrong body, she'd be fine with it. If being true to yourself means giving up who the world thought you were when you were born, I don't think Applejack would have a problem with that. But it kind of depends on how Equestrians construct identity.
I really enjoyed this. I can't wait to find out what happens next!
Okay, this is awesome. I love how you set a difference between Eris and Discord, while still making them similar. The E is for Eris song was cute, and seems like it would actually be one of Pinkie's little songs. The way she...almost seemed to play with Choco's mind was fabulous. And I have a lot of theories about how the two of them got switched, and exactly what Eris plans to do about it now that she's free.
However, I have only one question.
WHY IN THE NAME OF EVERYTHING HASN'T THIS UPDATED!?!?!?
I don't mean to sound rude, but it just really bugs me when good, well set up stories, with loads of potential, just stop updating. Please don't let this story die. Please.
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Because I suffered from a pretty severe writer's block throughout much of the summer and also got stuck writing 1 chapter that turned out to be a fourth as long as the entire story it belonged to.
"Stumble" is in my regular update cycle, which means that after I get done with the higher priority things -- Elements of Opposition because it's on rapid cycle, and No Escape from Yourself because it's older than a year -- I will be running through updates of everything. All of my stories except for No Escape updated December, January, or later, so as long as I get to this before December it'll be within a year. I wanted to get them all done within six months, but writer's block ensured that didn't happen.
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Stupid writers block. Thank you for the explanation. I'm glad to hear you plan to update soon. I'm sure it will be great.
These torments are inspired.
I like that it seems to be.. Flutters's element ENHANCED..
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If you assume that Discord and Pinkie did make a switcheroo, however, then Maud's comment is also absolutely spot-on, whether she realises it on a subconscious level, or got it right out of complete dumb luck