//------------------------------//
// 1. Fool 
// Story: Devil May Care 
// by horizon 
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The instant he opens his mouth, Discord realizes he didn't start the conversation with ulterior motives.

"I've never been unlucky," he tells Fluttershy as they stroll through the garden of the Castle of Friendship.  It's Friday the 13th, and an overheard conversation has snagged on his brain like a fishhook on a wool sweater.  "I want to know what it feels like."

They walk past a row of carefully trimmed hierocanthus bushes as the conversation pauses.  Discord ponders the surge of new knowledge that sprang into his brain as he spoke.  Fluttershy ponders, as she so often does, how to disagree with him gently.  

"You probably shouldn't," she finally ventures.

He frowns — but it's forced, now that he knows the opportunity this discussion will open up.  "Why?  Am I supposed to be boring enough now to only want good things?"

"You can want whatever you like," Fluttershy says gently.  "But I don't think you'll enjoy it.  Being unlucky will just make you feel worse, because more bad things happen to you."

"Well, maybe bad things are actually good for you!"  He flings his arms wide, startling a black cat that wasn't there a moment ago.  It darts with a yowl toward his path.  "Aren't poets fond of yammering on and on about how adversity makes you stronger?"

Fluttershy grabs the poor kitty, shushing it and petting it and releasing it back into the bushes.  "I think we get enough of that without going looking for it."

"You might.  I don't."  He pouts at the cat's U-turn, then summons a floating salt shaker and lines a claw up with it.  "I can snap my claws and change reality, remember?  Bad things don't happen to me unless I think they're funny."

Fluttershy holds her hoof up to the shaker as he taps it from the other side.  It bounces off her frog and stays upright.  "Please, not in the gardens," she murmurs, gesturing at a slug crawling past Discord's paw.

Discord frowns, and abruptly hares off toward a ladder leaning against the side of the castle.  Fluttershy lunges in and grabs his tail in her teeth, ignoring the clown-horn honk as it pulls taut.  Discord looks back, grabbing an eyebrow and lifting it.

Fluttershy sighs and tilts her head toward the earth pony at the top of the ladder.  "He's washing the crystal," she says, voice muffled in tail-floof.  "Don't be rude."

Discord huffs and crosses his arms.  "If I didn't know better," he says in his Ulterior Motive Voice, "I would think you're trying to stop your friend from jinxing himself.  Despite how much he's looking forward to non-enjoying it."

Fluttershy sighs and gives in.  "I'm sorry, Discord.  If you want to make yourself unlucky in a way that won't hurt anyone else" — she adds emphasis that would be unnecessary with anypony else — "I promise I'll support you."

His expression immediately brightens.  "Wonderful!" he says, and snaps his claws.





In the basement of the Castle of Friendship, there's a small platform on which stands a horseshoe-shaped frame studded with pink gems.  (Most ponies would tell you that the frame contains a silvered, reflective surface which feels subtly alive, its surface texture rippling like a windblown pond.  Twilight Sparkle would add that it's the portal to the alternate universe in which she briefly attended high school.)  Behind it is an unobtrusive metal case (which, Twilight would say, holds the magical journal which recently was installed to keep its connection active full-time).  And the platform is surrounded by an enormous mechanical cooling apparatus, crackling with thaumic discharge as it disperses the entropy of poorly stabilized magic.

Discord knows only three things about it.  One: In the week since it arrived in town, while Twilight has been overseas on vacation, everypony seems to be finding excuses to steer him away from the castle.  Two:  Everypony whispering about it behind his back refers to it as a mirror.  And three: Even from across town, that mirror disturbs his magical senses as if he were staring at Vantablack — such a perfect absence of sensation that his brain refuses to parse it.  

(Four things, now.  The fourth being that someday he will stand in front of it with Twilight Sparkle at his side, in a place that looks nothing like the Castle of the Friendship, and she will remark how funny it is that such a simple-looking thing could be the source of both of their most unusual adventures.)

The teleport deposits Discord directly in front of it with the wheeze of an unfunny joke.  Fluttershy appears halfway across the room, close enough for a front-row seat and too far away to stop him.  "Breaking a mirror won't hurt anypony!" he says, holding up a giant mallet.  "And when I'm done, I'll snap things back to the way they were, so Princess Checklist won't even be able to complain about property damage!"

Fluttershy's eyes widen, just a moment too late to do anything about it.  "Discord, wait —"

But he's already swinging.  The mallet gleefully passes through the mirror's surface, meeting no resistance whatsoever.  

Space distorts.  Time crawls.  The mirror surges from its frame and envelops him.

Then, with the ugly schlorp of division by zero, the whole assembly explodes.