//------------------------------// // When They Say To Change The World, This Is Not What They Mean // Story: Not The Hero // by alarajrogers //------------------------------// I don't want to do this anymore. I want to go exploring! Over a thousand years, and the world has changed completely. Equestria's remained horrifically similar to what it was before I took over; they've even built a town, Ponyville, where the suburbs of Equuapolis used to be, and Canterlot, aside from making use of that mountain I built that one time, is frighteningly similar to what Equuapolis was. New Maresterdam's now Manehattan, but Fillydelphia's still Fillydelphia and Vanhoover's still Vanhoover. The Crystal Empire's in a time lock, but it'll be popping out and becoming visible to ponies within a couple of months. Quite a lot of the culture's still same-old, same-old, but what do you expect from a place that houses the only Tree of Harmony left and has immortal rulers? The rest of the world has gotten a lot more interesting, though. I mean, I knew Albion had established a Parliament because I could feel the sweet, sweet disharmony even when I was in stone, but it's so much fun to watch ordinary, democractically elected ponies getting into vicious shouting matches with hoity-toity nobility (not to be confused with Hoity Toity, who is actually a pony living in Canterlot), and have it considered a totally acceptable means of running a government! Also they play a form of hoofball where neither magic nor wings are allowed, but ultra-violence apparently is, and routinely riot in the streets over the performance of their favorite hoofball teams. Then there's the Griffin Empire, where they consider themselves highly enlightened for not eating their ungulate subjects very much (they spare ponies, but not cows or sheep... helps to have the Alicorn of the Sun come from your species, I suppose. Celestia lets the little people self-govern for the most part, but she draws the line at pony-eating anywhere in the world.) Why, I remember the days when the entire territory currently claimed by griffins was overrun with dragons... of course, I might have had something to do with why that's not the case any longer, but when I ran things, the dragons were still there, just... possibly not entirely and completely sane enough to reproduce. Looks like while I was out of circulation, the griffins killed a whole lot of crazy dragons. Good riddance, I say. I wasn't going to kill them myself, not after defeating them as thoroughly as I did, but... you know, you'd think crazy dragons would be endlessly amusing, but truth was they got pretty boring within a century or two. And then there's where the non-crazy dragons went. The entire southern continent of this hemisphere used to be dominated by the feathered serpents (well, it used to be dominated by the draconequui, but sadly, those glory days happened before I was born, and the quetzalcoatls moved in from the far south once my kind were all dead), but the dragons of Western Neighropa who kept their sanity did it by running for Southern Amareica, and apparently I never noticed at the time because I was too busy having fun with the Neighropan dragons. Well, no one ever accused me of being detail oriented. So now there are nations down there of dragons and quetzalcoatls and sea serpents living together the way the pony tribes do up here, with an occasional admixture of Eastern dragons and even the occasional long-ma (funny how they swear up and down that they are not draconequui despite the fact that, well, frankly, they basically are. I'm sure it has nothing to do with not wanting to be associated with me; I'd consider that positively insulting.) Of course the further north you go, the more disorganized, violent and disharmonious the dragons are, which explains why ponies in general seem to have no idea that dragon nations even exist. Not that the civilized dragons are remotely peaceful; they're constantly at war with each other, warlords and matriarchs overthrowing each other in a perpetual churn of power, but they do manage to stick together in sufficiently large groups to have a war. See, now, that's harmony for you. When total disharmony reigns, no creature can actually get enough other creatures to team up with them in order to have a war. There were never any wars when I was the Superdave of Equestria! And ponies think harmony is so peaceful. I ought to take Twilight Sparkle down to the dragon nations to see what harmony gone wrong can do. ...oh, I just had to remind myself of what I'm trying to not think about, didn't I? Yes, I'm sure you've guessed it. I went on a short world tour so I wouldn't have to think about having to face... bleah, Anon again. (Seriously, that's his name? I can just picture his momma rocking him in her monkey arms, crooning, "Who's my little nameless one? Yes, you are! You don't have a name, no you don't!" Admittedly maybe I don't have room to talk, considering that I was equally nameless until the day my mother died, but a draconequus adult without a name would have been like a pony adult without a cutie mark, and besides, my mother called me Child, not Nameless.) I don't want to be having this fight. I want to have fun. I want to explore. I want to see if I can bring about the end of the perpetual warfare within the dragon lands by making them all hate each other so much they won't stick together well enough to form an army. I want to enjoy the lovely disharmony between Saddle Arabia, Camelstan, Minos and Tauros. I want to find out if I can get them to crown me Great Dalmuti of Neighypt for making it rain even if the rain is green lemonade.  I want to see if Scorpan the Peacemaker is really as badflank as everyone says he is or if I can make him flip out, give up on harmony and go become a hermit somewhere crying into his beer about what he did to his poor big bad bro. I want a rematch with Apep for the honor of Chaos (that's a joke, son, laugh! I said laugh!) I want to find Ar where she's sleeping, tickle her until she wakes up and see if she's really as hot as legend says (in the sense of attractive... she was a dragon who was a chaos avatar, I'm fairly sure she was as hot as she wanted to be in the literal sense.) The last time I was out and free I spent all my time tormenting ponies, but there's a whole world out there to be introduced to my chaos! Admittedly I'm not as ignorant of the changes to the world as Loonie was when she came back -- connection to disharmony, dreamwalking, and being able to view other realities kept me relatively au courant in comparison to the Moon Maid -- but feeling things happen at a distance, or viewing somepony's dream of events, isn't nearly the same thing as experiencing it for yourself.  Zebrica was loads of fun, and when I think about the fact that I could do the same thing in so many other nations, with so many other creatures, all over the world... and instead I'm stuck in a cave trembling with fear of worried about some stupid human... This is completely unfair. Unfortunately I know better. They have their Elements back, after all. If I go run off somewhere and completely ignore Anon and pals, I'll get distracted and forget to keep looking behind me and one day bam, they'll sneak up on me and I'll be a statue again. Or Anon will chop me to bits. Or both. I'm not sure how both would work, I'm fairly sure that my statue was virtually indestructible given the number of times during the first few months after Celestia and Luna first turned me into a bird bathroom that some pony or other tried to take a sledgehammer to me, throw me off a cliff, blast me with magic or drill holes in me, but if anyone could manage to smash an indestructible statue it would be Anon, since the limitations of the rules of magic don't seem to apply to him. You cannot imagine how much this irritates me. I am supposed to be the only one that the rules don't apply to! And honestly, that's because there's a superset of the rules, the laws of metamagic, that do cover me and what I do, and just because ponies don't know what those rules are and think I have to abide by unicorn magic rules, that doesn't make their ignorance my problem. Maybe there's a super-superset of rules Anon is covered by. I wonder how I'd go about finding out what they are?... Well. I know some of them. And one of them strongly suggests that I'm not getting out of this fight. Let me go on with my story and explain what I do know about Anon. When we last left our intrepid and handsome hero, he had narrowly escaped death at the hands of the psychotic human, and had retreated to this very cave to contemplate how a Seventh Element of Harmony was even possible. Upon such contemplation, he realized that in fact everything he had been doing since coming back home to Equestria was, in fact, stupid beyond belief, and normally entirely outside the range of what he'd have chosen to do... which implied that he was mind-controlled somehow, and only now, back home, was he free of the insidious control. So he began to think to himself, how long can I keep up writing about myself in the third person before I get totally sick of it? And the answer was, about this long. No, what I actually thought to myself was that I needed to do some research. I'd had sources of information available to me, while I was trapped in stone. When I was fully awake and paying attention, ie, not manufacturing a lucid daydream for myself or opening myself up to the collective unconscious, I could hear more or less anything that happened in Canterlot Gardens, and for reasons I'll explain later I was fairly good at deciphering snippets of caught sound from outside the gardens. I also had my Discord Sense ™ (hey, if Pinkie can have a Pinkie Sense...), which allows me to feel any major occurrence of disharmony pretty much anywhere on the planet, and by feeling out the shape of it I could generally figure out who the disharmony was happening between and what sort it was. When I was asleep, I could dreamwalk... my ability to affect the dreams of others was almost nonexistent, aside from pre-Nightmare Luna (I didn't actually have the ability to affect Luna's dreams either, but she had the ability to sense me, which meant I could goad her most entertainingly), but I could watch. And I could open vision portals into possible futures, alternate presents, and nearly anything that happened in the past. If this is sounding like I had plenty to watch to keep myself entertained... imagining cutting off your tongue, your legs, your wings (if you have them) and your horn (if you have one) and lying in a bed in a movie theater all day long. Exactly how entertaining would those movies have to be to compensate for the fact that you can't move or talk? I thought so. So hopefully we'll have no more of this "oh surely it wasn't that bad because you didn't go totally insane" sort of talk, and move on, shall we? The point is, I wasn't wholly ignorant of the world around me while I was trapped (forsooth, had such been otherwise, I might verily have arisen from my stone entombment speaking thusly to all ye ponies, and in such way have made of myself a laughing-stock, the object of jest and jape rather than the jester in self. Truly 'tis fortune that upon my arousal the command of today's vernacular was mine, or none might understand me save Luna and Celestia. Oh, if 'twere my fate how cruel would it have been, to be understood solely by dullard alicorns of ennui!) But I didn't know anything at all about Anon, how he got here, how he ended up with an Element even in the mundane sense of where he got it from, let alone how it could possibly exist, or what his relationship was to the others. They'd seemed very, very close, weirdly so really, but then the Elements worked off friendship between the Bearers, so I supposed that perhaps that might have explained the possessiveness and overprotectiveness I'd seen. Or perhaps the girls were trying to balance out his stupid, non-reciprocal Element of Protection by protecting him, so it would be reciprocal like the others. Though that continued to fail to explain how he'd been able to use it by itself. Elements of Harmony, by themselves, were useless. So I set out to learn as much as I could about the world, without revealing myself to anypony. First I hit the headquarters of the Equestrian Associated Press in Manehattan. A free press has always been near and dear to my heart; nothing generates controversy like the news. While most other institutions of government, business or academia seek a calm, happy, pacified population, the press knows that what bleeds, leads, because what the public craves to know about are the most chaotic and disharmonious things that might be happening in their world. The EAP receives news wires by telegraph and retransmits them all over Equestria so that if there's a massive brush fire in Appleoosa, or a politician indicted for corruption in Baltimare, or a model in Canterlot goes out in public with a few hairs loose from her manestyle, every newspaper in Equestria can print the information. All the news that's fit to print, and plenty of the news that isn't. I slipped into the building, late at night, located their filing cabinets, and took them, replacing them with solid chocolate replicas. While obviously everypony was going to know it was me, I thought it most likely that they'd assume I turned the filing cabinets, contents and all, into chocolate, thus destroying the archive of news articles. I strongly doubted anypony would realize I needed to catch up on the news. Then I took the filing cabinets home and bespelled the articles to read themselves to me. As perhaps one might possibly have guessed from my name, I'm very much at home in the center of cacophony. As I mentioned earlier, the chaos I prefer is the chaos of complexity, of so many patterns that no pony can distinguish them; I, however, am a different story. Understanding fifty-three news articles reading themselves to me at a time is an enjoyable challenge for me, a good hard workout for my brain. I made it a little more interesting (and much funnier) by speeding them up so they sounded like how you might imagine squirrels or bunnies would talk, if they could. Within a day or two, I'd gotten through the entire archive. What I gathered from it was that Anon had appeared in Ponyville, coming out of the Everfree Forest, about a week prior to the wedding of Princess Cadance and Twilight's Big Bootied Brother Furry Fatso, or I think that's what that silly acronym stood for, anyway. He had accompanied the Bearers to the wedding, which had been crashed by a particularly ambitious Changeling queen and her hive. During the resulting altercation, Celestia's clever trick for hiding the Elements really, really well backfired, as none of the Bearers were able to get in to get their Elements, but through some means wholly unexplained by any news article, Anon found the Element of Protection, proved to be its Bearer, and proceeded to more or less annihilate all the Changelings in Canterlot, of which there were quite a number. He was then given a medal and a stained glass window, which I resolved to change into a picture of him on the toilet at the first available opportunity. The interesting thing about all this was that the day after the wedding was the day I got free. As I might have mentioned earlier, I was too busy doing a happy dance of delight at my freedom, in Zebrica, to think much about how or why it had happened. So I thought about it now. Of course I'd noticed the Changeling invasion -- chaos and disharmony on that scale wouldn't have escaped me anywhere in Equestria, let alone in my own back yard. Superficially, one might guess that that was what had given me a flood of power and broken my bonds. But it didn't match up. When Goodnight Woon had her jealous hissyfit and launched an uprising against her sister, there had been a lot more chaos. Oh, that had been so deliciously painful, like being presented with the most gloriously delectable-smelling banquet right in front of you, only to find that you're chained to your chair and can't raise a paw to take a morsel of it. The bonds of Harmony had held me tight; I'd caught only the tiniest crumbs of power from that event, to the point where it would have taken me twenty thousand years of massive civil unrest to gather enough energy to break loose. Only when the Elements had reset in the process of transferring to new Bearers had my bonds begun to weaken, and it was a year after they'd finalized and transferred entirely to their new Bearers before I'd been able to gather enough power from disharmony to break myself free. One battle with a Changeling horde could not have begun to possibly make the tiniest chink in my prison, unless the Elements were shifting again. Well. Transforming from six Bearers to seven was certainly a shift. Not a shift that seemed even remotely possible, but certainly a shift. But even then, a change from one set of Bearers to another had still left me gathering power for years, for a whole additional year after the shift was done, and I was as weak as a kitten when I'd first gotten out... admittedly if you've ever seen a kitten in action you'd know they're capable of quite a lot of chaos, but the point is, I'd had to start slow. A bit of chocolate rain in Ponyville, a bit of cola raining onto Cloudsdale. Chaos is the gift that keeps on giving; I put some power into generating a bit of chaos, and ponies react with such sheer horror and confusion, I gather far more power from them than I lost creating the chaos. It hadn't taken me long to build up to speed, it's true, but there would have been no way I could have teleported to Zebrica right after breaking loose that time. Something hadn't just shifted the load the Elements were carrying and loosened my bonds. Something had charged me up. Someplace there had been a massive wave of chaos, and I'd missed it... and so had these news articles. I went exploring Equestria, wandering invisibly through towns, trying to find what had changed. When I thought back to that day, I remembered feeling a building wave of disruption and transformation all throughout that week; I'd been very excited, though I hadn't for a moment expected it would free me when it hit its peak. I remembered trying to find it, trying to stretch my senses, and coming up with nothing. It had tasted fresh, like change, not stale like entropy. But I hadn't for the life of me been able to feel out what exactly it was. On the day of that gloriously chaotic invasion, I'd thought to myself, oh, this was it all along, and by the time I would have been able to tell that no, the invasion couldn't account for it... I was free and paying exactly no attention to any of the problems I'd been worrying about in stone. In fact I'd kind of forgotten about them. This didn't worry me nearly so much as lapses like thinking I was being original and cutting edge by repeating myself; I knew why I'd forgotten about them. Sun! Sky! Lungs that can breathe! Food! Muscles that can move! My powers! Flying! Food! Colors! Sounds that aren't muffled by going through rock! Smells! Touching things! Hilariously terrified zebras! Food! My powers! Being able to stretch! Being able to lay down and sleep! Dancing! Wiggling! Food! No, it was entirely reasonable that I'd lost track of wondering about what that chaos I'd been detecting might be, once I was out. Something had to have changed. A lot. And yet there was nothing in the papers. At this point I need to briefly digress into another explanation of chaos, entropy, and information theory. You ponies think "information" is intelligible, understandable knowledge. "Pinkie Pie is a baker" is information. "Qtsafwjofjwojoeq" is not information. "Aujourd'hui, maman est morte" is not information unless you understand Prench, in which case it is. "Princess Celestia is a potato" is a lie and therefore not information. "A long long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, Princess Celestia was a potato" is fiction and therefore not information. However, the truth is that they are all information. To distinguish between information that has a meaning, and information that does not, we can use the terms "signal" and "noise." Signal is information that is meaningful; noise is information that is not. And one pony's signal is another pony's noise. To a pony who speaks only Equestrian, anything in Prench is noise, but to a polyglot like moi (which, for those of you who don't know Prench, means "me"), Prench is signal. For that matter my fifty-three newspaper articles reading themselves to me at high speed would have been noise to any pony, even Tia and Lulu. But because I have a truly astonishing ability to distinguish signals from each other and parse them into separate meaning so they don't degrade into meaningless noise, to me those articles were signal. The truth is, the whole world is information. This startles you. To you, information is what's held in books. Chairs are not held in books, therefore chairs are not information. But when I look at a chair, I see it as a collection of pieces of information, and if I change some of that information, the chair changes. It becomes a banana, or it walks off, or it tries to eat the hapless pony sitting in it. Magic is the manipulation of information, and frequently, the transformation of it. Now, if you shout off the side of a mountain, out to another mountain, you'll hear an echo... at first. It'll die off quickly. What happened to your signal? It degraded to noise, and then to nothingness, because it ran out of energy. This is the form of chaos called "entropy", disorder caused by a loss or transference of energy. Entropy annoys me because it disorders what it affects by making it less complex. It's still disorder, so it still generates magical energy I can use, but it's not... hmm... flavorful. When chaos is caused by things becoming more complex, when information becomes more dense, that produces much tastier magical energy. Disharmony is by definition more complex than harmony, because in harmony, signals are synchronized, and to a certain extent their behavior matches each other or can be predicted from each other. A disharmonious signal could be any signal at all that doesn't match, and the world of what doesn't match is always so much larger than the world of what does. One way or another, when information changes, it gives me power. Destruction is entropic change. Creation is change toward complexity. However, for either one to have happened on the scale that would have refueled me so thoroughly after the Elements drained me such a short while ago, it really should have turned up in the papers. How could the world have undergone a massive change and nopony noticed? So I went exploring, invisibly walking (and flying) amongst ponies in search of whatever it was that had changed. And at first, I didn't see it. Their world seemed every bit as idyllically peaceful and dull as it had ever been. Earth ponies still worked the fields and took their goods to market, pegasi still micromanaged the weather, unicorns still stumbled through life using only the tiny fraction of the glorious energies they were born to command that would help them enact the picture on their flanks. Same old same old. Until I realized... where were all the stallions? Now, just in case you're reading this at a time when the changes are still in effect -- which you probably are, because why would they revert if I haven't beaten him yet? -- you need to know this. Historically there has always been an imbalance in favor of mares, but throughout most of pony history it has not been all that large. I'm not the guy you want to go to for numbers, so I couldn't quantify it, but in a class of say 20 foals, a little over half of them would be fillies, maybe 12 to 8 instead of 10 and 10. During times of war and organized violence, the imbalance increases significantly, but I think we all know how harmonious and peaceful Equestria's been for the past several centuries. If you stroll down the street in an earth pony town like Ponyville you might not notice so many stallions, because a disproportionate number of them are doing work that involves physical labor, tilling their fields or restocking the shelves, and whether you're in Ponyville, Cloudsdale or Fillydelphia, the fact that the Royal Guard is around ninety percent male means that many of the boys are off in Canterlot. Males tend to do the work that involves being away from home for long periods of time, as well; they're the lumberjacks, and they're OK. Pegasus and unicorn stallions with water-magic talents may be off at sea. Nothing stops the marefolk from doing that kind of work, of course, but Equestria's a matriarchy that runs on friendship; mares stick close to home where their power base is. In the big cities, where power concentrates in noble families or where it's not about how many you know but who they are, this tendency is less pronounced, so you see a more even balance of genders out on the streets. Here's something else you need to know. I'm not going to be running for Her Royal Pinkness' job anytime soon; I dislike nearly everything to do with love and romance and would prefer I never had to deal with such sappy concepts again, but unfortunately for me, Canterlot Gardens has been the go-to place for romantic trysts between Canterlot citizens for an unpleasantly long period of time. I have heard far, far too many couples whispering sweet nothings to each other or making loud, smacky kissyface noises. Few of them actually went so far as to have sex in the gardens (more's the pity; that might have been fun to listen to), but trust me, I have been present at enough passionate clinches that Cadance ought to be paying me damages for mental cruelty. And I can tell you that the majority of these lovey doves were mare/stallion pairings. Again, numbers and I don't get along, but I'd guess as many as three-fourths of them were heterosexual couplings, and of the remaining couples, about two-thirds were mare on mare and the remaining third were fabulous. I didn't really notice this at the time, of course. As I said, I'm not interested in romance. I have as much interest in sex as any other red-blooded draconequus male (yes, it is red, I certainly saw enough of it when Anon cut off my tail that I can certify this), but ponies having sex with each other, without even inviting me to watch, let alone join in, isn't really a topic of pressing concern to me. And since personally I can't be bothered to limit myself to a single species or a single gender when I do go looking for playmates, the question of whether a mare is sucking face with a mare, a stallion or a grapefruit is normally not one I care about. But I have a very, very good memory, and when I was trapped in stone, I paid a great deal of attention to ponies any time they were near enough to my statue that I could easily hear them, regardless of what they were doing or saying or how unbelievably dull I'd have found it if I'd been free to go pay attention to something else. I remember the pony pairings I didn't care about at the time, well enough to assess their approximate gender balance and makeup. You know what I never got to hear? A threesome. Or moresome. I suppose it's possible that some of the chattering groups of friends I overheard went home and had wild sex with each other, but of the partnering ponies gazing up at the Mare in the Moon and murmuring pet words to each other while leaning up against the convenient backrest my plinth provided, I can't remember any of them being a group of more than two. Herds are rare. They turn up in times of unrest -- during the wars between the pony tribes, there was a severe shortage of earth stallions, because when ten earth stallions go up against a unicorn battlemage, nine of them die in order to distract the battlemage enough that the tenth can get in and buck the mage's head off. (Oh, you don't think ponies were ever that violent to each other? Au contraire, mes amis, your species eagerly sought to enslave or commit genocide against itself when you split along the tribal lines. Windigos don't show up because of petty quarrels.) So there were few enough remaining stallions that earth ponies herded, back then. And when I was in charge, there were herds, albeit more polyamorous than polygynous ones, on the logic that... well, I am the Spirit of Disharmony. I used to amuse myself frequently by influencing ponies to break up marriages or turn their kids out the door. (Hey, don't look at me like that. I was an orphan, left behind in the wilderness to fend for myself from the age of four, and I turned out just fine! There were pie trees and lollipop flowers and chocolate snow everywhere; no foal starved on my watch. Lost all their teeth, maybe.) When I unbalance a pony's personality it doesn't last that way forever, though, and ponies found that their families would hold together much better if they formed larger ones, so someone could keep the home fires burning and watch the kids until the unbalancing wore off and their lovers came back to themselves. (Eventually I figured out that this was what they were doing, but by then, I'd decided to go big or stay home, and I'd treat an entire town at once to an upside-down mindset for a week or two. Herds didn't help them much with that.) During times of peace, herds are not common. Lesbian relationships are common, but hardly a majority, and stallion on stallion does actually happen, maybe only half as often as the lesbian relationships but it's hardly unheard of. I'm sure none of this makes any sense to you, because the world I'm describing, the world that existed for millennia up until the moment Anon changed it, is not the world you know. Because what I found out when I noticed the stallion dearth is what you probably believe the world has always been. I had observed that there were far, far fewer stallions than I expected to see. I went looking for them in the places I'd expect to find stallions, and, aside from the Royal Guard, I found mares instead. Mares tilling the fields, mares cutting down trees, mares sailing ships... usually, mares in lesbian couples or threesomes or more, and I could tell this because despite the fact that I was observing them at their jobs, they tended to be all over each other, soppily affectionate and exchanging highly unprofessional pet names while logging or sailing or whatever. In the Royal Guard, a majority were still stallions, but the guard itself seemed... smaller. More ceremonial, less capable of fighting any sort of military force. Admittedly they haven't had to fight a military force in centuries, but they're supposed to be able to if they have to. And where I found stallions still living and working at ordinary jobs, I found that most of them had two, three or more wives. Herding was more common than pairing, now. (By this point, you understand, I was actively looking for anomalies relating to gender; it's normally utterly beneath me to care how many wives the stallion from St. Ives has.) And where I found a two-pony marriage still, most of them were two mares. There were still some traditional couples -- the Cakes in Ponyville, Cadance and her boytoy -- but for the most part, what I was seeing involved either two mares and no stallion, two or more mares and no stallion, or two or more mares plus a stallion, with the old school pattern of one mare and one stallion almost absent. Now, far be it for me to look down on anyone's fun! Why, if Equestria had suddenly exploded into a hotbed of polyamorous perversity because of some sort of social change I could see, I'd be all for it! After all, I was an immoral polyamorous sex beast before it was cool. I could really enjoy a world where everywhere I turn there's mare on mare action... if it weren't for the fact that no pony alive appeared to be aware that this was a change. So I did something that horrifies me to this day. Something so awful, I shudder uncontrollably when I look back on it. I took the form of an ordinary pony, went to the central library of Manehattan, and went back through two years' worth of newspapers... reading the wedding announcements. Guh! I want to scrape my brain out with a whisk broom and a can of maple syrup. I didn't repeat this experiment anywhere else, but I didn't need to. Prior to Princess Cadance's wedding, the wedding announcements were exactly what I would have expected... mostly announcements for mare & stallion couples, with a fair amount of mare/mare and a small but noticeable number of stallion/stallion. The first announcement of a herd wedding, between a stallion and three mares, was the day before Cadance's wedding, with the actual date set a month in the future. After Cadance's wedding, I couldn't find any traditional mare/stallion announcements. Admittedly at that point I'd been free less than a month, and I broke loose the day after her wedding, but... there hadn't been any time prior where there had been no mare/stallion weddings announced for longer than two days, let alone a month. I already knew there was nothing in the papers discussing the change. And there should have been! An upheaval like this was only possible if either an enormous number of stallions vanished into thin air, or transformed into mares overnight. There should have been rioting! Grieving widows screaming at Celestia to find their husbands, if they'd vanished, or former stallions shrieking at their leaders to solve this problem and restore their lost manhood, if they'd changed gender! There should have been panic in the streets! There should have been chaos! But there wasn't. The change had happened, it had created such a massive transformation of information that it had filled me up with energy, just the same as if there had been chaos... but there was no disharmony. There was no visible disruption of order. Something had radically changed and ponies just went on with their lives as if it had always been that way. This horrified me. I love change, I live for it. But to change everything underneath our feet and leave us unaware of how it happened, or when, and, for the ponies, even that it happened? I had to admit I had a bit of an existential crisis. Kidnapped a few mares from a small town near Vanhoover and forced them to tell me what they saw when I changed things. I made a hill into a checkerboard bowl, filled it with giant cornflakes, made the cornflakes float as if they were in milk, and made them ooze pine sap so the ponies kept getting stuck to them. Turned one of them into a balloon and used static to stick her to another. Chased them around with giant waffles that were trying to eat them. Caused some of the checkers to be quicksand and then rearranged them when the ponies figured out where the safe places to stand were. The whole time I kept asking them, "Now what am I doing? What did I just change?" By the end most of them were crying too hysterically or too shellshocked to keep talking to me, but one of them managed to describe my chaos back to me all the way to the end of the session, so I didn't do any of the apocalyptic or horrible things I'd threatened to do to them if they refused to talk to me... I sent them back home, completely unharmed. Well, I might have rearranged their manes some and cast illusions to make it look like I'd switched their cutie marks, but that all would wear off in a day or two. As nearly as I could tell, reality was still real. Things I set into motion randomly, without knowing what I was creating, could be described by ponies who were looking at it, before I turned to look myself. Ponies still occasionally did things I didn't realize they were going to do. This wasn't a dream I'd fallen into, in stone, and forgotten it was a dream. I could be fairly sure of that, at least to the extent I can ever be sure of that. Yes, you're glaring at me now, I'm sure. I did terrible, terrible things to those poor ponies, you say. I terrorized them. I made them think I'd kill them or subject them to fates worth than death if they didn't cooperate. Well, yes, but if you thought there was a significant chance that reality wasn't real, would you really care about the welfare of possibly imaginary ponies you were using to perform a reality check? Besides, none of them suffered any worse pain than exhaustion or the nasty feeling of pine sap in your coat, and in the end none of them came to any harm, and if you're so worried about their sanity, why aren't you worried about mine? Just because I don't behave like what you think a sane pony would act like when I'm at my best, you think I deserve to be left in some solipsistic hell where I can't be sure reality even exists? I never trapped ponies in a dream for longer than a single night! Well, okay, except for Luna, but given that her turning me to stone was what left me in a place where I started losing track of the difference between reality and dreams... she had it coming. I'd confirmed that what I remembered being true had been true, and I seemed to be the only creature who remembered it that way. I'd confirmed I wasn't trapped in a dreamworld. That left only one possibility, horrible as it was. Someone had actually altered reality. Don't tell me I'm a hypocrite. I don't alter reality. I alter things in reality. If reality is a house, I rearrange the furniture, replace the drapes, pull up the carpet, repaint the walls and hang new pictures, but I don't turn the house into Ponyville Station, and most especially I don't make it so the house always was Ponyville Station. Of course, you think it was always Ponyville Station and I'm just insane, or trying to trick you. The historical records haven't been altered to match everypony's memories. At least, not last time I looked. You can confirm that what I'm saying is true. You can check it. Listen, this isn't what I do! This is radical change, yes, but there's no chaos. There's no disharmony. I want ponies to notice when I change something! I want them to look out their windows and yell "SWEET FILLY CELESTIA ON A POGO STICK, IT'S RAINING UMBRELLAS!" I want them to be shocked, amazed, horrified, discombobulated, confused. I don't want them to just go on with their day as if nothing had ever happened! This is a perfectly harmonious change, a massive transformation of absolutely everything that bothers nopony because nopony can remember that it happened at all. Aren't you horrified? I am! The bedrock of reality, the consensus of the collective unconscious, the one constant value even I could never bear to change because if you change it, it becomes impossible to measure or even notice any other changes... and it's been altered. Do you feel violated? You should! I do! And I'm the only one whose memories weren't altered, probably because I was trapped in stone when the change happened, and if magic could alter my stone form in any way, I'd have been able to use chaos to alter myself into something that could actually do something, a long time ago. This is not like you ponies utterly losing your marbles over what I do to the world with my chaos. This is completely different. Still think I'm a hypocrite, flipping my own lid over someone doing to the world something very similar to what I do, except I'm not the one who did it? Fine, whatever, believe what you like about me, but if you hate my chaos you should hate this even more. Have you realized yet that thousands of ponies have either been vanished from reality entirely, with their loved ones having no memory of their existence, or have had their memories so massively rewritten they've undergone a gender change and they don't know it? Do you understand now why I'm afraid? Do you know now why I'm willing to face a maniac who's already cut off my tail once and nearly killed me, in the desperate hope that if I can find a way to stop him, I can restore reality? If I was going to change thousands of stallions into mares, I'd make quite sure they remembered what they were supposed to be. Fine, I'm sadistic, I'm disharmonious, I do these kinds of things specifically because they upset ponies. But I wouldn't make it permanent, and I wouldn't make it so nopony remembered the world the way it had been before. That makes me better than this. Doesn't it? Even knowing that someone had altered reality, I didn't immediately assume it was Anon. He'd seemed really pretty pathetic when I'd fought him. Okay, he'd beaten me, so he wasn't that pathetic, but he seemed so... average. Unnotable, aside from being on a planet where no other of his species resides. He wasn't a great intellect, and I didn't yet understand why I'd put up such a poor showing against him, but I did know that his swordfighting skills weren't that spectacular. I'd just gotten really, really unlucky, I thought. When someone has done something, and you know absolutely nothing about who they are or how they did it, the one reliable clue you may be able to turn to is this: who benefits? So I considered that. Who benefits from altering the structure of the Elements of Harmony in some way to add a seventh that can be used independently? Not the Tree of Harmony itself, the new Element was too unlike the others. Order, maybe, and Matrisse had actually attempted one of these bedrock changes to reality once; of we three avatars Matrisse is the only one with the power to alter the playing field, because it's the entity that sets and enforces the rules. Except it's suffering from a slight case of unfocusedness due to the fact that I smashed it into tiny pieces, and if enough of Matrisse had come back together to do something like this I would have felt the shift in the thaumic field. I can detect changes in the balance of magic, and that would have been a major one. Who benefits from altering the structure of Equestrian society so there are a lot fewer males, and herding and lesbianism have become common? A male who wants a herd and doesn't want a lot of fair competition.  But how could anypony who wielded such power have such a ridiculously venal motive? I mean... I don't wish to be crude here, but put it this way, when you have the kind of power that can make your dreams come true, a lack of nookie ceases to be a major crisis. Self-satisfaction takes on a whole new meaning when instead of being limited to Madame Paw, you can have Madame Realistic Full-Tactile Illusion Of Absolutely Anypony You Want. Entities as powerful as I am just aren't motivated all that much by sex, because it's too easy to get almost anything you might want. Love is another story, but the kind of love that involves mind-controlling your partner and altering their memories so they think they have always loved you is not satisfying. Believe me, I've tried it. It doesn't work. Even altering their memories so they don't remember that they ever stopped loving you, when they were your lover once but broke up with you over irreconcilable differences like the fact that they think you're a monster now, turns out to be tremendously unsatisfying and actually rather painful. Who benefits from making me act like an idiot? Any of the Elements of Harmony, including Anon, but none of the ponies demonstrated any such power in the past. Anon was the only one of the group who could have done it. What's the likelihood that the mares of Harmony would embrace a new member who was a male stranger of an unknown species, who they just met, as thoroughly as they seemed to have? Well, they did make friends with each other shockingly quickly, but on the other hand, I happened to know that all of them had been linked since the day of Twilight's magical surge, that the force that grants ponies their cutie marks had connected them somehow. If someone rewrote reality so that there had always been a Seventh Element, perhaps they might have also rewritten it so the bearer of that Element would be connected to the others in the same way, and more or less instafriend them. But why would anyone have chosen to bring a human here to wield the Element of Protection, when there are plenty of none-too-bright stallions who could have been tapped to do the job? But I was looking at this the wrong way. What if the point hadn't been to create a Seventh Element, and then choose a human to wield it? What if the human had come first, and the Seventh Element had been created for him? If Anon was the one who had done this, then the timing matched; the transformation of information started happening after he came to this world. Wouldn't an entity who wanted to alter reality and then pull in some poor sucker from another world to take a role in the new reality have performed the alterations first and then dragged their target in? If Anon had done this, then there being a Seventh Element of Harmony for him to wield would fit, because he'd have been the one to create it for himself. To give himself power, and a role. And that would explain why I had been an idiot in his presence. But why make me an uncreative idiot? And where did the business with the stallions fit in? So I went and spied on Anon in Ponyville, invisibly. Amazing how much you learn when you turn invisible and coil around one of the branches of Twilight's library tree. I learned that he knew a great deal about the Bearers, and always had -- in his world, they apparently had a fairly accurate fictional adaptation of the Bearers' lives running as a popular entertainment, but most humans were unaware that the adaptation was an adaptation, assuming it to be pure fiction. (I assumed. Either that or our lives really are fictional stories written by coatless monkeys, but I am having a hard enough time with my grasp on reality to be willing to go there.) I learned that everyone in Ponyville liked him except for two bratty fillies, who he had demonstrated considerable cruelty to in the course of teaching them to stop bullying the sisters of the Bearers... despite which, the father of one of the bratty fillies liked and respected him even more for "knocking some sense" into his daughter. Because everypony knows, if you can't manage to keep your child from misbehaving, you'll consider a coatless ape five times your daughter's size who roughs her up to teach her respect a gift from the heavens! I learned that his hands were considered wonderful and vital tools that everypony in Ponyville wanted him to make use of to perform any number of activities. Oh, if I'd only known hands were such beloved accoutrements by ponies, I'd have manifested myself some! Certainly  I wouldn't have encountered fear and suspicion and disgust at being an unusual creature, unique to this world and unfamiliar to ponies, if I'd just had hands! I imagine little Spikey-Wikey will be thrilled to learn this as well! I also learned that all of the Element Bearers, who he referred to frequently as the "Mane Six", were herding with him. All of them. With occasional orgies. I'm very much in favor of orgies. I'm very much in favor of orgies involving multiple ponies having sex with a male who has hands and comes from a completely different species and is the only representative of his kind on the planet. But I'm not in favor of involving ponies whose personalities have been altered by said male in such orgies unless they specifically requested that said male perform the alteration. And I'm very much not in favor of rewriting the entire universe and disappearing or gender-switching thousands of ponies so that their failure to compete with me will allow me to get ponies who wouldn't otherwise have wanted me involved in my orgies. It was Anon. It had to be Anon who had done this. Whatever other entity might have thought there was a benefit to creating a Seventh Element of Harmony and then picking a human for the role, no such entity could possibly have thought it was a good idea to make all of the Bearers of the Elements fall in love with him. After all, friendship is magic... lust is chaotic. The potential for jealousy tearing the group apart if they were all in love with the same male was a terrible, terrible idea, from the perspective of someone who wanted to make the Elements more powerful by adding a seventh. But that potential would be completely ignored, if the one who made the change was a selfish twit who really wanted to have sex with six attractive, powerful mares and didn't think he could win them over the hard way. And yet he showed no signs of knowing what he'd done. I spied on him a lot, as the seven of them searched for Luna and the missing Elements. I'd have thought that one of them would have thought of the Castle of the Pony Sisters right away, but even Twilight didn't seem to think of anything unless Anon said something that gave her the idea. However, I saw no active use of magic from him, and I never heard him say or do anything that would suggest he knew he'd made them love him or he knew he'd made them his sycophants, unable to think for themselves unless it pertained to their special areas of talent. It wasn't as if he was running around throwing mind control powers about willy-nilly. It was more like... he'd turned Equestria into a stage, and our lives a play, with himself in the starring role. Except it was a fairly terrible play because, as the star, he was the leader, the one who came up with all the good ideas, and in reality his ideas were fairly stupid, so everypony else had to play the role of idiots in order to let him shine. I have no idea how his power works. But since I went out and did all that research, everything else I've seen backs up my conclusions. He wants to be a big hero, and events conspire to allow him to be. He wants to be beloved, so six mares herd with him, and don't consider it strange, because the whole world has altered such that herding, once a rare practice looked down upon by mainstream society, is now common and normal. He wants everyone to be his friend, except the ones he doesn't like; those, he wants to be his enemies, and he wants to defeat us, humiliate us, crush us and, at least in my case, kill us. The desire to confront him, to do something to harm him, is getting stronger. He doesn't want me to hole up in a cave writing down my observations about him, he wants me to go taunt him to his face and do some moderately annoying things so he has an excuse to cut me or thrash me. I want to know how long I can hold out, but at the same time, I'm afraid that if I wait too long, I'll lose myself in the emotion, and behave recklessly, and he'll kill me. It's not worth the risk. Time to go take my life into my hands and make my token appearance in front of him again. If I survive this, then the next time, I'll write about the various confrontations I've had so far, including the sad and humiliating details of the incident with my tail.