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!
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It's alive! Welcome back to this. :)
11188417
Wish granted.
Would a Random tag work?
I don't get it.
So... we get some from behind the scenes. But it seems that "new Discord" is trying preserve old timeline.
Had to re-read earlier parts to catch up, but I'm glad to see more of it. Glad you're still kicking as well.
11192334
However, he says he won't act the same as Discord in the show, so he acts the same as Discord in the show.
11192386
Well so far he's only really had two major events happen, his release and now Celestia's gambit. It's of no benefit to him to interfere with either of those overmuch, but in the future we should have some real fun divergences.
Pride of place, the Tirek incident. Without that whole sequence of events, Twilight doesn't have to forgive him anything, and the magical Harmony-box thingy stays locked. Which means, no gaudy crystal abomination, no map, and nothing else that came of that.
Heck, if he happens to find those Plundervines and deals with them himself, then the Tree might well never be found.
11192386
So you need to keep in mind that for Eric Reese, "Discord in the show" is Return of Harmony and that's it. He didn't see Keep Calm, it hadn't aired yet when he died. He hadn't seen anything from after it, either. So he doesn't know about the plunder vines. He didn't know about Twilight's upcoming alicornation until just now. Therefore if he says "I'm not gonna act like Discord" in the show... he means he's not going to act like Discord did in Return of Harmony. Which, arguably, Discord hasn't really done since. Even in Twilight's Kingdom, he shows a lot more guilt and hesitation than he did in his introduction.
Thus, if he ended up acting exactly like show Discord while trying to portray a reformed Discord, that wouldn't be a contradiction. All he's ever seen of Discord is the guy being an even bigger dick than Eric is, and that includes his vision of past-Discord.
I'm happy to see more of this. A draconequus story is almost always a good story. And seeing this kind of perspective is quite interesting.
Didn't expect this to wake up from its stone prison again, this will be interesting to read. Good to have you back author.
As for the peeps commenting on how our not Discord is acting like the real Discord at times. Just relax and enjoy the ride, see how it plays out more as we got a few new bits added in to spice it up from the OG material.
Confusing and frustrating. I don't understand what the point is or where its going. If the story is meant to be "meta" or have some sort of bait and switch prank on the readers it isn't working. Whatever you're trying to do with the story is instead having a negative effect on the narrative.
I hoped that he will turn into President LokI for that
Yeah it's not like you do it only for yourselves.....
If they did it for Twilight they would have asked for her opinion
Because now they want to force her to later leave her family and friends when they die from age and force duties on her she doesn't want
I hope that he will call them out on that
And maybe tell everything or show a vision of their conversation to Twilight before or after it happened
Oh a new chapter
I'm surprised he didn't mention how Celestia's plan was for Twilight to become an alicorn and watch as her friends, the ones that help her BECOME an alicorn, grow old, wither and die, while she will continue to live.
Well now, this is interesting . The idea that Celestia unpetrified Discord not because she was worried about someone like Tirek (who, lets face it, poses a fraction of the threat an unreformed Discord does) but because she needed a backstop for Twilight's ascension makes a lot of sense.
"Oh you actually want the marks back right? To things to be as they should be?"
"Yes!"
"Then figure it out! You made this mess, you clean it up!"
11193241
Making an allicorn is very hard, even if it ridiculous Cadance did so by ACCIDENT.
Also Discord could keep the others alive by making them younger but he would only care to do so for Fluttershy so he can't exactly complain.
11194756
My point was that he didn't mention it to Celestia.
holy shit I wasn't expecting this to update again. I loe the scene, it makes so much sense, if I didn't know better I'd assume it was cannon.
11194770
Why would he? Firstly, who would know better about the issues of being an alicorn than Celestia? Secondly, he's just learned right now what an alicorn even is. The idea that he'd immediately jump to the conclusion "this will doom Twilight to outlive her friends" is not very plausible. Thirdly, since he knows nothing about what an alicorn is, making any wise-ass remarks about it has the chance to backfire if he says something that contradicts what Discord should have known, because he's hiding the fact that he;s somebody else. And fourthly, Celestia just said that if this plan doesn't go through, it risks Equestria becoming "an empty planet, stripped of magic and life." He absolutely does not care enough about Twilight to want to spare her the fate of outliving her friends at the risk of that.
Also, on a more meta note, this is not an issue I personally am concerned with because in real life, humans outlive their friends all the time without being immortal. Two of my close friends have died and I'm in my 50's. MLP is a terrible series to be obsessed with immortality angst, because the angst of being immortal is about being alone... but Twilight has four other alicorns, one of whom is her niece, and she has Spike, an immensely-long-lived dragon. And who knows what else will happen before the rest of the Mane 6 die. I've never understood why so many people latched onto "the tragedy of outliving her friends" rather than the fact that she has so many other supportive people who are immortal or extremely long lived. It's an issue that I think is more appealing to young people because they haven't thought through the fact that mortals outlive their friends all the damn time. Twenty years or a thousand, if you don't learn to keep making friends with people younger than you, you will either end up with no friends because they all died, or you yourself will die and leave them to mourn you.
What if Spike had a family? What if Twilight gets to be a mother figure to an entire clan of dragons, all of whom live over a thousand years? What if more alicorn babies are born? What if Sunset Shimmer turns out to be an alicorn when she comes back to Equestria? What if the fact that Twilight is connected to the other five through the bonds of harmony means that none of them will grow old and die as long as she remains alive? The Pillars didn't have any alicorns among them, and Celestia and Luna were both alicorns when they took up the Elements of Harmony, so we literally do not know what happens to fellow harmony bearers if one of them is an alicorn. I'm writing a fic where in fact that was the entire point of the box from Twilight's Kingdom. It wasn't about the castle, it wasn't about beating Tirek, it was about binding them all together so that none of them can die of old age as long as Twilight can't. Meghan McCarthy said Twilight won't outlive her friends... what if that means they are actually all immortal now, just only one of them looks it?
There are a lot of much more positive ways to look at Twilight's immortality than the same sad song fic writers on this site keep jumping to.
11195102
Okay, I just woke up and don't yet have the mental faculties to make my full, drawn out argument, so I'll just give you the brass tacks.
How did Rainbow Dash not qualify to become an alicorn, when she pulled off a feat that was believed to be physically impossible?
Even ignoring how she did it as a filly, because the relevant parties only saw the after-effects, she did it again in front of Celestia herself and maintained the same speed while carrying four more adult ponies.
I do have arguments to make for some of the othwrs, but I can't yet think clearly to explain them in a way that makes sense.
11195260
Oh, that's easy: because it's really fucking hard to become an alicorn unless you actually cast a spell to do it, and that is what Starswirl's unfinished spell was.
"You created new magic": bullshit. If that was the case Starlight Glimmer would have elevated to alicornhood the moment she improved on Starswirl's time travel spell so you can go back 20 years instead of one week. The spell was intended to use the bonds of harmony between members of different pony races to elevate one of them to alicornhood. Starswirl was probably thinking of using it with the Pillars, but he didn't get friendship so he didn't work in the interconnected bonds to nearly enough of a degree.
And that's why I think Twilight being an alicorn might have a profound impact on her friends' lifespans. Because the spell she cast used them, used their magic and their intertwined destinies. That was how she fixed the spell and that was why it made her an alicorn. I think it's entirely plausible that using that spell to make an alicorn binds the destinies of everyone involved together. So the others are not alicorns, but Twilight's destiny is entwined with theirs. And that might make them immortal (or at least very long lived).
Cadance is just incredibly weird. I think her issue was that she was up against a unicorn with an amplifier, and that she had abnormally high levels of magic for a pegasus. (Different magic. Like... Rainbow Dash has a ton of pegasus magic, but Fluttershy has a ton of a kind of magic pegasi don't generally get. Applejack has high levels of earth pony magic, Pinkie has a ton of magic that earth ponies don't usually have. It looks like it's a natural variation of some kind.) Magical amplifiers may play by all kinds of strange rules.
(And yes, this means Celestia fed Twilight a line of bullshit about why she became an alicorn, but the problem is that that episode, Magical Mystery Cure, is easily one of the worst written episodes in the entire series and yet it's a huge lynchpin of the plot. Like... ideas were fantastic. Execution was utterly fucked.)
Good chapter
Glad to see this back again! Always neat to see someone competent behind the chaos wheel.
11192608
And don't take this person's bluntness too hard. Maybe they need to reread the previous chapters, because everything seems pretty solidly straightforward to me.
11196614
And you're a valued and contributing member of society. Some advice, next time try something constructive instead of putting others down for having an opinion.
11194770
Celestia was an ass and assumed things.
11192316
There's nothing to get. It's just the character's name before he was Discord
11192608
I have no idea what the complaint is. The first arc was Discord's redemption episode, told given the additional detail that it wasn't Discord all along, but a human swapped into his body and powers. This gives some additional depth to the redemption as it shows a significant internal narrative rather than kinda hinting at it the way TV shows have a hard time going past because monologues and voiceovers are lame.
The second arc is now a later sequence of events. Same character, more additional background explanations, more internal wondering etc. How is this a bait-and-switch?
Oh boy. This raises a number of uncertainties. We don’t know how long “Magical Mystery Cure” was for the ponies. If it took Twilight more than three days for her epiphany…
This could be very bad indeed. Hard to say we get to that point. We’ll see in time. In the meantime, best of luck in getting more time for yourself and your writing. But especially the former.
I wonder how often Discord become insane, mad & sane again and what ever is in between...
Having attended a moderately well-funded public school, I can confirm this is not a problem unique to poor areas.
Attending school in rooms buried in mazes of corridors. Nearly all of which were without windows to see out of, and very few of which had natural lighting at all. Middle School sucks.
"Equestria Girls... Ouuuhhh"
The living nightmare of every fanfiction written who stalks these halls!
Did I do that right? I've been working on it.
Oh, the places you'll go.
,This is looking pretty sick, so far...
- Sincerely Ya Boi Satan.
P.S. Keep up the good work, Permissions Granted.
I genuinely was hoping this story would be a bit different than the actual show, but I was disappointed...
Besides that it was written brilliantly, I enjoyed reading the internal thoughts you made up for discord and your take on his actions.
A bizarre combination of good writing, and huge amount of obsession, cringe, with a bit of exploring fetishes. Also drugs. Forced shipping. Unoriginal use of boundless powers and stupid decisions. Also, protagonist is actually sick in the head.
But it all also seems intentional most of the time.
It's not bad, it's just... Interesting only for specific kinds of people.
11231876
I... feel like you are not reading the same story? This one doesn't have fetishes, forced shipping, or even sex aside from the main character occasionally mentioning what he did as a human or curiosity about his new body. Drugs got a peripheral mention as things he did as a human, but hardly anything significant. Are you sure you didn't post this on the wrong fic?
I really don't understand all the criticisms coming toward you on this fic. I think the story is great so far and you have no idea how glad I am that you've come back to this after two years! I've been following it since chapter two I believe :)
continue with this story please it's really cool I really loved this story please :)👍
11195284
The Amplifier was also specifically made of a crystal similar in nature to the Crystal Heart or the Tree of Harmony, which probably had something to do with it. Though I’m personally fond of The Great Alicorn Hunt’s interpretation that canon Twilight actually got it fucked up, both by casting Starswirl’s borked up spell first and then by developing a less wrong but still flawed version. It doesn’t really make sense for a spell based on friendship to ascend one caster to godhood, when it could have done the same to all of them. Though I’m less fond of some of its other stances but what fictive work doesn’t have some weird shit.
Although I’m a little surprised he didn’t at least try to use his supposed ability to sense magical fluctuations to scan for if those ponies were still
valid test subjectsalive. Especially since they were speaking in modern vernacular and he’d noted the previous vision’s archaic speech.Not bad, the character himself fit well into the role of Discord, it was interesting to see how it ends.
Hello Glimglam, sorry Discord. She's recent.~
I love this and I would love to see a sequel!
Sorry if this would be a repeat of similar comments. So this is more or less the same as Canon, but extra details given by a human whose background match canon Discord's mentality to accept friendship. Not saying anything bad, since read stories that would give their character viewpoint of the scenes, especially an original scene to emphasis differences of this person would do and junk. Also assuming he only has knowledge of season 2, since chapter 1 he just heard discord's return for a season.
11551816
He may have seen some of Season 3 but certainly not all the way to the end, or he'd have seen this episode.
Nha, te falta mucho para eso, demasiado.
No voy negarlo, fue gracioso.
En general, pasable, me reservo mis comentarios.