//------------------------------// // Chaos Ending Chaos // Story: The Day The Chaos Stopped // by alarajrogers //------------------------------// It started when you were having tea with Fluttershy, and you asked her for another lump of sugar. It turned out she'd run out, and she mentioned stocking up the next time she went shopping to prepare for your next tea party. For some reason, it had never occurred to you before that Fluttershy had to put work into these tea parties, had to go shopping and spend her hard-earned bits... even though you know that Fluttershy doesn't have magic like yours and can't just make things happen by thinking about it, even though you know that Pinkie prepares elaborately for her parties, it had somehow never clicked in your head that of course Fluttershy has to work to make these parties happen because that's what ponies have to do. They can't wish whatever they want into reality. In the past it might actually have pleased you to know that Fluttershy is working to make you happy, every week; it would have reinforced your belief that you matter to her. Now, however... now you know that you matter to her, and more importantly, she matters to you, and you no longer feel good about the notion that she's working to make you happy and you're doing nothing but sitting on your tail and accepting it. You're the all-powerful one, so why are you making your friend do all the work? You feel guilty. It's an awful feeling. You've never gotten used to it. Specs shows up on the ceiling while you're trying to figure out what to do about this, grabs your ear, and suggests, "Why don't you host the next tea party?" It's a good idea. You're irritated that you didn't see it immediately, because it's obvious, and then you're irritated that you're irritated, because Specs is you so if he came up with it then you came up with it. So you manifest a "Number 1" up-pointing glove and say cheerfully, "I've got it! Why don't I host the next tea party at my place?" Specs pokes you in the nose and says, in an even more irritable tone than you'd felt a moment ago, "Hey, that's my idea." Too big for his britches, is what he is. He's part of you, not his own entity, and he should learn to accept that. You snap your fingers and banish him by dropping him into a hole in the ceiling, upside down, and then pop his copy of your chair like a balloon. Fluttershy is open to the whole idea, and the more you think about it, the more enthusiastic you get – until the moment when Fluttershy mentions that she's never been to your house before. This reminds you that you've never hosted a tea party before, which makes you realize that you have no idea what you're doing – and you've already gotten her to agree to doing it tomorrow, because you're so enthusiastic about it. Which means... you have no idea what it means. How much effort goes into planning and setting up a tea party? You don't know! You've never done one before! All you know about them are the ones Fluttershy has held, and the ones that Celestia used to put on for you and Luna but that was two millennia ago and there've been so many changes and anyway you were all kids. Is it possible you've bitten off more than you can chew? Will the preparation for a really good tea party that will impress Fluttershy take longer than a day? You have no idea, and while normally the notion of embarking on something where you don't know how it's going to turn out excites you, the thought of failing Fluttershy and putting on a tea party she doesn't like is mortifying. You need to leave and go make plans. Specs isn't a lot of help. He tells you you need to knock this one out of the park, as if you don't already know that (after being ostentatiously offended that you dismissed him, like he thinks he's real; he's only willing to give you the advice you need after you point out that Fluttershy is the beneficiary here.) When he says that Fluttershy deserves the best of everything, though, that gives you a starting point. Fluttershy does deserve the best of everything, and while you can certainly make anything she could desire, you aren't so self-confident anymore as to believe that the things you make are the best things to give Fluttershy. After all, you're no expert on tea parties. You go to the tea shop first. In the old days you weren't much of a fan of tea; it didn't really have the pizazz you were usually looking for from a drink. Now, though, you find the dizzying variety of various types of tea impressive. You suspect there was a lot less variety back when you unruled Equestria, which all by itself suggests to you that there was a flaw in your decision-making back then. Nowadays there's a lot less chaos, but when it happens it's original and fresh and it's not always yours. The complexity of great variety in a thing that ponies consider "normal" is something that wouldn't have happened on your watch, and you've come to like it. What you don't like is when everything varies in just one regard. Every single tea just has a different taste! You knew that, of course, but you feel compelled to rant about it in the tea shop. Why can't tea have different tastes and also different effects? Why can't the tea do different and fun things? Why can't the rose hip green tea turn you green or grow roses all over your hips? (You rule that one out. Fluttershy would probably find it somewhat annoying to turn green or to grow roses from her hips.) Why can't ginseng tea actually sing? (That one, you decide on. Fluttershy would like a jaunty tune, you figure.) After you change the ginseng so that it sings, and pay for it, the tea shop pony has the nerve to question your friendship with Fluttershy. The nerve! As if Fluttershy is so short-sighted and narrow-minded a pony that she can only be friends with others who are exactly like her? As if you're not capable of recognizing Fluttershy's many wonderful qualities just because she's not particularly chaotic? This is what you always hated about ponies, but you control the impulse to turn the shop pony into a turnip because Fluttershy would definitely be mad at you if you did that, and also Twilight, and honestly all of the rest of the ponies you consider friends, not to mention Spike, and besides if you think about it you admit that you would not like to be turned into a turnip by someone more powerful than you just because you said something hurtful and idiotic (although there is no one more powerful than you so this is just a thought experiment, of course, but you've lived through losing your powers three times now and it is theoretically possible that while you can't access your powers someone more powerful than you are at that moment could turn you into a turnip and you are fairly sure you wouldn't appreciate that, and Fluttershy says that if you wouldn't like it if someone did it to you, you should assume they probably wouldn't like you doing it to them, most of the time, unless you ask and they say yes.) You do, however, decide to annoy her by asking for validated parking when you don't even have a wagon parked in their lot. You could snap up a tea set, but you know that Fluttershy's aesthetic sense runs much closer to what ponies think is attractive than what you like to look at, so you decide to buy one for her. Something expensive, finely made, and beautiful to pony eyes. The clerk at the shop that sells bowls and plates and tea sets nearly ruins your mood all over again by once more questioning your friendship with Fluttershy. What is it with these ponies? They all know Fluttershy – they live in the same town as her! How can they be so ignorant as to not know that anyone with any sense would be friends with Fluttershy if they could be? And once again, you're reminded how normal and boring pony lives are... all a teapot is supposed to do is pour tea? Yes, yes, you knew that, but they act like that's a good thing. Not for your friend, though! Only the finest, most exciting and interesting teapot for Fluttershy! Sure, you'll go with plain classic white even though you'd have preferred a jazzy orange and green styling if you'd been choosing for your own taste, and sure, it can be shaped like a teapot rather than a screaming pony head or an apple tree or something else unrelated to tea and pouring it, but at least it can pour itself and fly around like a decently interesting teapot... once you alter it. You pay for it, with a lot of bits. You've found that since you finally have enough bits that you don't have to be careful with them or count out the correct amount anymore – which was absolutely hellish and you still resent Celestia for having forced you to go through that, back in the days when your only source of income was the bits she was paying you for closing all the gaps in spacetime around Equestria – you can get a lot more cooperation, and a lot less terrified screaming or rigid, teeth-chattering non-responsiveness, from the shopkeepers in Ponyville and other places if you just pay them for everything with a huge pile of bits. Celestia still doesn't let you make your own, but you've got several deals going with video game manufacturers that you enchant their games to give the enemy and NPC sprites a much more chaotic range of possible actions they can take. Apparently gamers love that stuff, they can't get enough of it. Arcade owners can charge two or three times as many bits per game for the ones you enchanted versus the ones programmed by ordinary pony game creators, so the game manufacturers can sell or lease the games for a lot more, and they give you a percentage of the profit every time they sell or lease a game machine. You've done some work with interactive comic book and interactive book creators to do similar things – no one wants the full range of your chaos, no, but to make a comic have multiple possible endings because in addition to the interactivity the readers provide to it, you've made the villains and non-player characters have the kind of agency and variety of actions they can take that you've routinely given to soup tureens and lamp posts in the past? Kids nowadays eat that up. And then there's the action figures that can actually take action. Mostly, doll versions of your friends, though you snicker hysterically to yourself every time you see a foal playing with the Nightmare Moon doll you enchanted to say things like "I would like it if somepony would style my mane" and "My star barrettes are fabulous!" Or the Celestia figure that loves to dunk her head in cake. Generally cake belonging to the foal playing with her. Next up, the party supplies store. Decorations! An adorable piñata and a lava lamp are cute, but not quite enough. Fluttershy won't want to break open the cute piñata no matter how tasty the treats inside are, so you decide to make it sneeze out the candy. And the lava lamp would be a lot funnier if it was an actual tiny volcano. The napkins are a bit more of a puzzlement – how do you make napkins interesting? Should they glow? Not enough. Fly? Better, but for Fluttershy you need a bit more. Fold themselves? Fold themselves into fun shapes? Ooh! Is that Pinkie Pie? You consult with Pinkie Pie. Surely she would know how to make this party perfect for Fluttershy! Her suggestion is that you make Fluttershy feel comfortable, and that you ought to be able to do that easily, because you know her so well. She's right! You do know Fluttershy well! This ought to be a piece of cake, you decide confidently. You give the clerk enough bits that you can walk out without having to worry about actually going through the checkout – it's so tedious – and head home with your goodies. Make Fluttershy feel comfortable. You mull it over, pacing in front of your house. You know her so well. You should be able to do this, right? Make Fluttershy comfortable. Shouldn't be a problem. You open the door to your house, where you've already teleported the things you bought. The ginseng are floating around, singing, intermingling with the flying folding napkins. The piñata sneezes out candy as the teapot sails past it, escaping from the scene of the crime after having randomly knocked down a photo of you and Fluttershy that was hanging on the wall. The swirling vortex of chaos in the center of the room shimmers in time with the burbling of the volcano on the ceiling as lava pours out. Some of the popcorn bush's kernels take the opportunity to pop loose. Pages flap on the books growing out of the book tree. Maybe this is a problem. But maybe not! Fluttershy is your friend, right? Maybe... maybe she would be comfortable here? You're comfortable here. Would she feel better if you're in a comfortable place? (Are you sure you're friends with Fluttershy? You seem so very different from her.) You need Specs. You made him to have a rational, clear head, unclouded by your obsessive love of chaos. You made him to care about what your friends think. He'll have an objective opinion. So you summon him into existence. And he gasps in horror. "That bad?" Your heart sinks. "No, worse! Fluttershy would never be comfortable here! What have you done?!" He waves a rolled-up newspaper at you, as if you were an errant puppy. You don't particularly appreciate that. "I was trying to make the tea party different and special, like me," you retort... but you can't escape the judgement of your own self. You wilt. "But all I did was make it chaotic and weird... like me." A horrifying thought strikes you. "What if those ponies at the tea shop and the china shop were right?" The train of thought unfurls in your mind, and you shake, wrapping yourself in your arms in a near-fetal position and rocking back and forth midair. "What if Fluttershy sees how crazy this place is and realizes how different we are? And then doesn't want to be friends anymore?" By the end of it you're in a full-blown panic, so the paper bag Specs gives you is appreciated. You blow into it hard, trying to recover yourself. "Relax! We can fix this," he says. "Time to call in the team." He opens the door and lets four copies of you in. These ones are the ones you're more used to making, the constructs without a lot of independent thought, programmed to do as you command them... except Specs created them, so they're under his command, but technically he is you so they're under your control, ultimately. Specs turns to  you expectantly. "Okay, chief. What's the plan?" You pace back and forth, your mind frantically shooting off in a thousand different directions, unable to focus and come up with an answer. "What to do, what to do, what to do... Oh!" The revelation, when it comes, hits hard... much harder than the other five Discords that crash into you because they were pacing too closely behind you. "Got it! We know Fluttershy, and we know what she likes. First of all, we need to get rid of all the new stuff." Specs, being the one who is technically in control of the other four, shouts, "You heard him! Strike the new stuff!" He puts on a hard hat, as do the others, and you follow suit because it was your idea in the first place. The others get to work. Two of you vacuum up the volcano on the ceiling (which, admittedly, had been dripping just a tad much.) One of you catches the flying napkins in a jar, one of you catches the teapot, the ones who dealt with the volcano scare off the piñata by summoning bats (piñatas hate bats, for obvious reasons), and you capture the ginseng teabags and stick them in a box, which you mail... somewhere. "Well done, everybody, but there's still more work to do!" you carol at your other selves, who'd been just about to tuck into their lunches. They grumble at you, but you ignore them. "We need to make this place more Fluttershy and less, well, me." The thought occurs to you to be grateful to Twilight Sparkle. You used to have a much more elaborate and even more chaotic home, but she wrecked it completely, and when you finally got around to making a new one you made something themed along the same cozy-cottage lines as Fluttershy's house, though with your own twist to it. Now, all you have to do is get rid of that twist. You'd never have been able to un-chaos the old place. You teleport into the chaise lounge you made after sleeping on Fluttershy's chaise lounge for several days. "One thing I know about my dear friend is that she loves comfy chairs. But not on the ceiling." With a snap, it's on the floor. "And I'm almost certain she likes stairs... that lead somewhere." Specs obligingly grabs the bottom of the stairs to nowhere and snaps it into an elastic wall hanging. "And although we've never discussed it, I'm pretty sure Fluttershy likes gravity." Another snap, and you have consistently applied gravity throughout the cottage... causing several of your copy selves to fall, but really, why were they playing cards when there was work to be done anyway? Oh, right. Because they have no imagination. You're the only real person here; you're the only one with the vision of what you want this place to be, for Fluttershy. "Okay, fellas! This is a good start, but stand back. Let me show you how it's done." You start snapping boring, ordinary, suburban-tract-housing style pony decorations into place, grateful for once for the hours of total boredom reading the magazines Fluttershy collects while she would deal with her animals. This is the stuff the magazines she gets are full of, so this must be what she likes, right? There's an ache inside you, a twingeing pain when you look at what you've turned your home into. It's absolutely, horrendously awful, and the fact that you created it, and not for a prank where you're going to undo it all and laugh, is like nails scraping on the chalkboard of your brain. Also, your thumb hurts from snapping too many times in rapid succession. That, you can easily fix. The ache is something else. You made a home that's perfect to show off to Fluttershy, completely boring and normal and unexceptionally pony, and it's hurting you how dull it is. But it's for Fluttershy. It's to keep her friendship. No sacrifice is too great. Thinking that was probably your first biggest mistake. "How boring," Specs says. "I mean, normal." "Thank you!" "Good job," he says. "The window treatments are perfectly unexceptional." And he's right. Everything is perfect and symmetrical and incredibly dull and ugh. Part of you can hardly bear to even look at what you've done to your lovely home. But it's for Fluttershy. Losing her would be worse than anything imaginable. You steel yourself against the weird aching sensation inside you, and muster up more cheer. "But we're not done yet," you say. You can't just attend such a fancy tea party as what you've created in your normal everyday fur and skin. The situation calls for dressing up, and you need the stimulation of some variety and change. Specs' eyes go wide. "You don't mean..." You nod. "Mm-hmm." And all of you carol at once, as excited as little fillies, "Makeover!" Every costume you put on that's actually stylish and attractive, Specs hates. You try not to get offended. He's using what would appeal to Fluttershy as a metric, not what's objectively more colorful and complex. Eventually you wear the most boring, pony-dad outfit you can think of, and he says, "Hating... how much I love it!" Because the conflict in your heart, between what you want to be and what you need to be to keep Fluttershy's friendship, is affecting him too. Of course it is, he's you. You try multiple different hairstyles. All of them are too weird, too chaotic... too much like who you really are. You recognize finally that you're hitting the limits of your own ability to imagine normality, and just settle for your standard appearance. Specs dresses up as Fluttershy and you try conversation cards that you got from a book you stole from Twilight's library way back when. "It is very nice to see you today," you read painstakingly. "Have you read any good books lately? Your garden looks positively lovely." It hurts to do this. It hurts to say these things, to stomp on your own desire to be spontaneous and free. Your own nature is rebelling against you, but when you say something that's too close to real, Specs scowls at you with a fake Fluttershy face. (You could have made an entire fake Fluttershy but that would have hurt far more when it disapproved.) He's the part of you that you need to listen to right now, not the rebellious screaming in your head that this is awful, that every last bit of this is awful, even that friendship with Fluttershy isn't worth this. Of course it's worth this! It's worth anything! Didn't you learn your lesson from Tirek? You wanted chaos, and you wanted freedom, so you hurt Fluttershy, and what you got was terror, deprivation, betrayal, and very nearly death, not to mention the depression and guilt afterward. Your desires to do anything you want and make everything special and different and unusual are bad when you're trying to keep a friend. Friendship is about compromise, right? Twilight would say so. For a moment you consider consulting her. Should getting ready for a tea party with a friend really hurt like this? But you shake it off. You've learned your friendship lessons, you know what you need to do. You don't need Twilight to tell you the obvious. Fluttershy leads such a quiet and peaceful life. Surely the only reason you've managed to stay friends with her at all is that you've toned down the chaos when you're with her. She'd be scared off by the real you! Why, she was afraid of your stained glass window, when you first introduced yourself to her! She was terrified of your maze from the very first moment! (You don't think about the fact that when it came down to it she was the only one you had to use brute force on, the only one who could stand up to you, because you don't like remembering the way you hurt her.) No, it's obvious what you have to do. Your eyeballs lift out of your head and swing around to the back. Guided by your eyes, your paws reach up and open the little panel at the back of your skull, where there are dials attached to your brain. You spin down the one labeled "PAIN" until it's almost at zero. Then you also turn down "EXISTENTIAL ANGST". Good. Now you won't worry about whether or not you're violating your very nature and purpose in existing while you're making sure you keep your friend. You close the panel, put your eyes back, and go outside. "What do you think of all this?" You wave at the sky. "Fluttershy and I go out for picnics when the weather's nice, and I was thinking of doing the same here, but..." "Don't be ridiculous! You went to so much work to make the house normal, and now you're going to take her outside? To see all this?" Specs also waves his hands at the ever-changing bands of darkness smeared with threads of light that pulsate and ooze all around your little island. "Fluttershy could never tolerate looking at all this chaos!" "But Fluttershy likes to go outside," you reiterate. "And I'm the master of chaos, and that means I can tell chaos to stop being chaos." Specs blinked. "Are we really that powerful? This place is a lot older than we are." "I'm not talking about transforming the entire dimension. Just a small section of it! A bubble of not-chaos for Fluttershy to enjoy." "Hmm. Well, it's theoretically possible, but it's going to be a lot of hard work." "Ugh, I know." You sigh. "Help out?" Specs shrugged. "You're the guy with the vision, boss. Point me at what you want to do." "Well, I'm thinking that first we make a sun." You snap a small magical fusion reactor into existence. It promptly burns itself out, fizzling like a candle. "Maybe a bigger sun." "Let's get the guys in on this." Specs summons the rest of the team. With vacuum cleaners, butterfly nets, and a miniature Tirek squeaky toy, they gather up enough magic from what seethes all around you that you can draw from it and transform it all into a tiny sun. After some thought, you realize that suns should not be purple, and change its spectrum to radiate the same as Celestia's, so the lighting will be right for Fluttershy. Next you need a blue sky. You create a gigantic sphere around your island home, large enough to accommodate the sun. You've made plenty of suns in the land of Chaos, but most of them are just magical points of radiance and heat shaped to look like a sun. You're a little out of shape – the fusion reactor was hard, and making a sphere so big that you can put the fusion reactor in it without having it get unpleasantly hot on the floating island is even harder. Then there's the fact that the energies of chaos are more like an aether or a cloud than like air or space; even when you paint your sphere bright blue (you use the paint tool to color it, and have the extra Discords fix the spots you missed, because it would take too long with paintbrushes and rollers), the seething dark glow of chaos magic is all around you. It makes the sun dim and the sky look dark and forboding. "No, this will never do," you say. "Come on, guys, one last push!" The other Discords shove the chaos magic with giant pushbrooms, or bail it into a bucket, or siphon it with a pump. Specs makes small tornados that whirl the chaos magic into bottles. You just snap at it to move it outside the sphere. The effort is enormous. You can't feel pain anymore or you're sure this would hurt. You transform your island into a temporary replica that looks like Equestria, and make cute animal sprites all over it, and some of the guys go and get some of the animals native to this dimension and then you size them down and let them loose here, because one thing you do know about Fluttershy is that she loves animals, even strange ones. The Skalboggen expresses deep irritation at this, but you tell it to suck it up. The Information Sphere, which looks exactly like the disembodied head of Twilight Sparkle, is very enthusiastic about getting to meet a pony, and very disappointed when you put her in a box and teleport the box to the back of your pantry. Fluttershy probably would not actually like to talk to something that looks like her friend's disembodied head, and also, the Information Sphere never shuts up. You chastise the Discord who thought getting that thing was a good idea. The other yous point at him and laugh at his stupidity. He pouts. The chaos magic makes holes in your sphere and oozes back in. You push it out. It comes back in. You strengthen the sphere. It routes around and makes small explosions pop out of your island. You shut down the explosions. The sun goes nova. You barely have time to teleport all the living things off your island before literally everything is vaporized, including the sun. "This is looking like a no-go," Specs said. You sigh. "I really wanted to take Fluttershy outside." You recreate the island, and the thinking tree, and your perfectly unexceptional and boring new house. Fluttershy might go in the kitchen and offer to help with the washing up, so you have to fix that too to look completely normal. Oh! And ponies need bathrooms! Sheesh, that could have been embarrassing. You feel drained. Empty. Flat. This must be what ponies feel like all the time. No restless energy burning through them, no obsessive desire to make everything in the world different, to make the patterns stop matching. All the patterns in your house are now a perfect match for common patterns found in Equestria. Everything is normal. Just in time, too. It's almost time to get Fluttershy! The six of you put your lion paws together, and then you vanish them all. Alone in your completely remodeled house, you mutter to yourself. "Huh. Quite strange. For the first time in my life, I don't feel quite strange. In fact, I feel... completely normal." This is what being normal feels like, right? You're excited to see Fluttershy, but normally you're abnormally excited, bouncing up and down in eagerness. Today, as eager as you are to see her... you feel tired, and kind of hollow. Well, you have stayed up a full day, or more, and you did expend a lot of magic fixing up this place. Plus all that business trying to make the outside conform to normality, to the predictable world Fluttershy lives in. You could have just thrown up an illusion, or made something that looks like a sun out of magic, but you wanted it to be right, and it turns out you couldn't do it. Chaos here is too unruly, even for you. But at least your house is completely under your control. "Everything is finally perfect for Fluttershy. And just in time." You put on a pair of spectacles, because right now the part of you that loves friendship is ascendant which means you're kind of Specs right now, except not because he's only a piece of you and you're always all of you, though right now you feel like maybe you're not quite all of you. That's okay. You can go back to being chaotic later. You don't even really care about that right now. All you care about is Fluttershy. You're so excited!