//------------------------------//
// Twilight Sparkle's Excellent Chaos Adventure 
// Story: Signal to Noise 
// by alarajrogers 
//------------------------------//

There was no way to tell time in this endless orange space, but from the aching in her eyes and the growling in her belly, Twilight could assess that she'd been flying her book floor around for probably hours, and had not found Discord. She had, however, found some other giant piles with gravity on both sides, such as a giant pile of clothing – which had confirmed that the culprit here had to be Discord, because nopony could possibly have fit into the long, skinny outfits with mismatched sleeve sizes, and the few pairs of pants she'd found had a tail hole far, far too wide for a pony's needs, a hole that would in fact have rendered the entire purpose of pants moot had it been on a pony's backside. The giant pile of random eggs from what seemed to be hundreds of species, with three tiny heat-radiating, glowing objects that resembled nothing so much as the sun, if the sun was the size of a pony's hoof, orbiting about it, had surprised her... why would Discord need so many eggs? And what were the mini-suns doing, incubating the eggs? A third floating pile she found consisted of nothing but shower curtains. Two other piles seemed to be completely random junk, with no unifying theme whatsoever.

Apparently Discord hoarded things. Well, he was part dragon. Hopefully the presence of his clothes meant this was some kind of closet, not a pantry, though given the things she'd seen Discord eat, she couldn't rule it out.

A flash of green caught Twilight's attention. She turned to look at it. Floating in the distance was a vaguely elliptical green ring with something light-colored inside it. It wasn't a giant pile of something, which made it the most interesting thing Twilight had found so far. She levitated herself and her book floor over to get a closer look at it.

Up close, it was definitely some sort of dimensional portal, leading into a room made of pale cream and dark brown marble. That didn't look chaotic enough to be one of Discord's decorating schemes, which meant it might well be a way out of here. Twilight piloted the book collection close to the portal, at which point it unexpectedly turned into a vortex. She screamed as it pulled the books she was on top of in, despite her best effort to hold them together, and then her.

Twilight fell face-first into a puddle of pudding.

Once she got her legs under herself – which was difficult, as her hooves kept sliding on the pudding – she managed to rub enough of the pudding out of her eyes to see properly. The "marble" the room she was in had appeared to be made of was marbled pudding. It looked like vanilla and chocolate, but tasted like cream cheese, bananas, mint and cinnamon, with a bit of pumpkin thrown in. And of course, the books she'd been riding on were now saturated with it.

Sighing, Twilight decided to make a safe space for the books to sit. Her first thought was the corner, but no – the walls were also pudding rather than actual marble. Using magic, she pushed the pudding on the floor out of the way in a square large enough to contain the books if they were neatly stacked, then cast a spell to freeze the pudding at the edges magically, so it would solidify and hold its shape. It wasn't an actual freeze spell that manipulated cold, but a solidification spell, so she wasn't worried about it melting. She stacked the books up, cleaning pudding off them as she did so. 

Once the books were protected, she bent her head down and ate pudding. She'd gotten quite hungry and thirsty in her time driving the book platform around, and while the taste of the pudding was decidedly weird, it wasn't bad. The moisture helped to quench her thirst at least a little bit, though she would have given a lot for some cold water.

What she was actually standing on resembled obsidian, or black glass at least. She didn't know how the pudding clung to it so evenly, but she was dealing with Discord, so there was no point in trying to figure it out. The combination of the incredibly smooth surface below her hooves and the pudding up to her fetlocks made the floor treacherously slippery, reminding her of the time Discord had turned the roads to soap. And then she remembered how he and Pinkie had both navigated those soap roads by skating on them rather than walking. Carefully Twilight slid her hooves across the glass, gliding – albeit slowly, clumsily, and against the pressure of a considerable quantity of pudding – toward the doorway that she saw on the other side of the room. It was not a large room, though the ceiling was very high – pony architecture often had high ceilings in public places to accommodate pegasi, but this room's ceiling was almost as tall as the ones in Canterlot Palace, despite the room being no bigger than the main storefront of Sugarcube Corner.

Twilight pushed the door open, noting that the pudding did not follow her, and stepped out onto a thick green velvet flooring that made her feel like a terrible pony for tracking pudding onto it. She looked up, taking in her surroundings. This was a hallway so long she couldn't see the other end of it, the walls decidedly muted for Discord – they were striped, and the stripes followed no pattern aside from being mostly vertical and largely rectangular, but the colors were pale, cream and washed-out pink and watery blue and other colors of very low intensity. Artwork hung on the walls. 

More things Discord had stolen? It wasn't enough for him to rob libraries, now he was an art thief too? She could certainly see why he'd taken these particular pieces, though. One was a desert landscape with inexplicable furniture holding up clocks that had melted. One was a tile representation of a pony, except that many of the tiles were misaligned or flipped, so that when she unfocused her eyes or tilted her head, she could for moments see a simple farmhouse instead of a pony in the pattern of the tiles. One was a magically animated painting featuring a ballerina in shadow, perpetually spinning on one hoof, except that Twilight couldn't figure out what direction she was actually spinning in; she seemed to change mid-spin, but not in a way that suggested an actual magical change, rather that Twilight's perception would shift to recognize that she had always been spinning in the new direction. There was the sun hatching out of an egg, there was a painting of an endless, impossible staircase, there was a vase in an alcove that suddenly appeared to be two ponies conversing without the actual image changing at all. Some of the paintings were random splatters of color. All of the pieces were weird, simultaneously eye-catching and disturbing. 

The thing was, Twilight didn't recognize any of them. She'd read many books on art history, and never seen any of these. Either Discord stole them so long ago that they didn't make it into the books, or... A thought both horrifying and exciting began to blossom in her head. What if this was actual Discordian Era artwork? It was widely believed that all records from the Discordian Era were lost, no art, books, or verbal tales more complex than simple bogeyman tales to scare foals surviving to the modern age. But Discord had been the ruler, of a sort, and in all societies she'd ever heard of, rulers were major patrons of the arts. She'd always tended to assume that Discord had interacted with ponies in the same ways he had when he broke free, that they would have all been uniformly terrorized by him and treated as his toys. That was probably true, but at the same time... Sombra had commissioned art. And Discord was arguably more creative and artistic himself than Sombra.

Were these works that ponies under his rule had created for him, in exchange for rewards or possibly just being left alone? Or maybe simply inspired by the everyday chaos around them, and Discord had taken the art they'd made and put it in his vault because he'd liked it? There were treasures here, masterpieces forgotten by ponykind. She continued to walk down the hallways, staring riveted at the paintings (and other works... there were magically animated images, there were carefully crafted automata, there were statues made of jello and she had no idea how that thing held together under its own weight, there were dollhouses depicting buildings that were impossible to construct even with magic). One painting was of Discord himself, rendered in angular shapes that didn't quite line up with each other, creating a highly distorted but still recognizable image. Had somepony imagined this, or had Discord actually taken this form? There was an island with a small town, on the back of a giant fish. Had Discord made such a thing, and a pony of the time had painted a realistic view of what they'd seen, or did this come from a pony's mind? There was a waterfall, falling up and splashing into an upside-down lake spread out across the sky. There was a stallion calmly fighting an attack of lemons with an umbrella. There was a beautiful mare whose pupils had teeth. 

"This is incredible," Twilight murmured to herself. "How long has this stuff been here? Has he really had it stashed away for more than a thousand years?"

"HAST THOU QUESTIONS ABOUT THE GALLERY?" a creaky, echo-y voice asked.

"Gah!" Startled, Twilight jumped, and turned to face the speaker – a skeleton. "AAAAH!" She threw up a shield around herself, shrieking.

The skeleton didn't move. It wore a vivid purple cloak, edged in gold, with a hood that only partially concealed its skull. The voice was feminine. "I AM THE KEEPER OF NAMES," the skeleton said. "SHOULDST THOU WISH TO KNOW THE NAMES OF THOSE WHO CREATED THESE WORKS, NEEDST THOU ONLY ASK AND I SHALL SAY."

"Uhh." Twilight lowered the shield, but not her guard. "Um. What is this place?"

"THIS IS THE GALLERY OF DISCORD. HERE, OUR PINECONE DISCORD PRESERVES THE WORKS OF PONIES WHO HAVE DEMONSTRATED A CREATIVE, FREE MIND, UNTETHERED BY THE LIMITS OF MUNDANE, ORDERED REALITIES."

That was pretty much what Twilight had thought it was. "Pinecone?" She raised her eyebrow. "Why is Discord a pinecone?"

"'TIS CUSTOMARY TO ADDRESS THE LORD OF CHAOS WITH TITLES OF RESPECT THAT MEAN NOTHING, WHICH ARE CHOSEN AT RANDOM. OUR CABINET PIN DISCORD SHOULD NOT BE ADDRESSED WITH TITLES THAT CONVEY A SENSE OF HIERARCHY AND ORDER, SUCH AS 'KING' OR 'LORD'."

"But you just called him 'Lord of Chaos'."

"THAT IS NOT A TITLE OF RESPECT. 'TIS MERELY AN ACCURATE DESCRIPTION. SKY PANDA DISCORD DOES IN TRUTH CONTROL CHAOS, HENCE 'LORD OF CHAOS' IS CORRECT."

"Are you a real skeleton? I mean, are you a dead pony that Discord used magic to resurrect as a skeleton, or...?"

"THY QUESTIONS SEEM CONFUSING AND POINTLESS. THAT IS THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM. THOU SEEMST THUS WELL EQUIPPED TO STUDY CHAOS. HAS BONGO DRUMS DISCORD BROUGHT THEE TO THIS PLACE FOR STUDY?"

"Um... not exactly. I sort of got here on my own. Wait a minute, why do you keep calling me 'thou'? I mean, I know you're from at least a thousand years ago and that's how ponies talked then, but I thought ponies only used 'thou' to friends and family, or to social subordinates. Are you some kind of superpowerful lich and that's why you keep calling me 'thou', because you think you're my superior or something like that?"

"I AM NO LICH. I AM BUT THE KEEPER OF NAMES. TO BESPEAK ANOTHER PONY ALONE AS 'YOU' IS TO BASELY CRAVE ONE'S OWN SUBJUGATION AND SLAVERY. NO PONY IS GREATER THAN ANY OTHER PONY; ALL ARE EQUAL IN THE EYES OF CHAOS, AND MAY BENEFIT OR SUFFER EQUALLY BY THE WINDS OF CHANCE. THEREFORE ALL PONIES SHOULD BE 'THOU' TO ONE ANOTHER, AND TO ADDRESS A SINGLE OTHER PONY AS 'YOU' IS TO SAY THAT THEY ARE MANY IN COMPARISON TO ONE AND THEREFORE OF GREATER RANK OR VALUE, YET ALL PONIES ARE EQUALLY LOWLY AND NONE SHOULD HOLD RANK OR RULE OVER ANOTHER. I SPEAK ONLY TO A GROUP OF PONIES AS 'YOU'. WHY DOST THOU OTHERWISE?"

"Welll... you've been in here a long time, and the language has changed. Now ponies just all say 'you' to one another all the time and hardly anypony even knows how to use 'thou'."

"INTERESTING, TWILIGHT SPARKLE. I SHALL CONSIDER THY WORDS, BUT 'TIS TOO SOON TO CHANGE MY CUSTOM ON THY WORD ALONE."

"Wait, how do you know my name?"

"I AM THE KEEPER OF NAMES. SUCH IS MY NATURE," the skeleton said. "HAST THEE A QUESTION REGARDING THESE WORKS, OR SHALL I LEAVE THEE BE TO PERUSE THEM?"

"Um. So you know the names of the ponies who created these?" She pointed at the picture of the endless staircase. "Who did that one?"

"THAT PAINTING IS 'UP THE DOWN STAIRCASE' BY MORE CURLY ETCHER."

"And that weird painting of Discord that's all distorted? Who did that one, and was it a painting from life – like did Discord actually look like that or did the painter make it up?"

"THAT PAINTING WAS CREATED BY STONE MAGPIE. 'TWAS HIS STYLISTIC AFFECTATION FOR MANY SUCH PAINTINGS, TO DISTORT HIS SENSES' PERCEPTION IN SUCH A WAY. A PAINTING THAT IS TRUE TO LIFE IS NO TRUE CHAOS, EVEN SHOULD IT BE PAINTED OF CHAOS. TO MY KNOWLEDGE NONE SUCH ARE PRESENT HERE; ALL COME FROM THE CHAOS OF MIND AND IMAGINATION."

"Wow." Of course, the artists had probably been inspired by the world of chaos outside their windows, but even so, to create all this strange and different art seemed an amazing accomplishment to Twilight. Pony art was generally either realistic, or stylized in some way – such as the stained glass windows and the paintings in the book about Nightmare Moon that Twilight had first consulted to learn about the thousand-year-prophecy, or the exaggeration of comic books. Art that was both realistic and completely unnatural, such as the melted clocks or the stallion fighting lemons, or art that was stylized to the point of distortion, like Stone Magpie's work... she'd never seen anything like it. "This could revolutionize the art world," she murmured. "I wonder if Rarity could get any inspiration from this? But here it is hidden away where nopony can possibly see it!" To distract herself from growing levels of frustration that had no outlet, she pointed at the melted clocks. "Who did that one?"

"DOLL SAVIOR."

"Did all ponies during the Discordian Era have ridiculous names?" Doll Savior? More Curly Etcher? Stone Magpie? What kinds of names were those? More Curly Etcher didn't even make any sense, unless there were a lot of foals in the Etcher family and More Curly was the one with the curliest mane. 

"I DO NOT KNOW THE NAMES OF ALL PONIES, ONLY THE NAMES OF THOSE WHOSE ART IS FOUND HERE." 

"How about this one?" Twilight pointed at a painting of a mother rocking a foal, who was holding on her lap a toy teacup, and in the teacup there was a mother rocking a foal, who was holding a teacup, and when Twilight used magic to magnify the piece, she found at least two more mothers, foals and teacups, and for all she knew it went down even further than that.

"JENNIFER LINT."

Twilight blinked. That had to be the most ridiculous name of all. What did "Jennifer" even mean? It was just a collection of nonsense sounds.

She took a deep breath. "This gallery is beautiful, and any other time, I'd love to walk up and down it for hours, but I need to find Discord. Do you know where he is?"

"IF CHISEL GRAPEFRUIT DISCORD IS ON THE PREMISES, I DO NOT KNOW HIS WHEREABOUTS. HOWEVER, I CAN SUMMON THE SKALBOGGAN TO TAKE THEE SOMEWHERE. IT WILL NOT NECESSARILY BRING THEE TO PENCIL PIE DISCORD, BUT IT WILL NOT NECESSARILY FAIL TO DO SO EITHER." The Keeper walked a short distance down the hallway and pressed a green button with her hoof, and it lit up.

"I guess that's probably the best you can do," Twilight said. "Wait, what's the Skalboggan?"

"THE REINDEER CALL A PILLBUG 'KLAPPAR SKALBAGGE'. THE SKALBOGGAN IS A VEHICLE THAT SLIDES ON SPACE-TIME LIKE A TOBOGGAN."

Twilight was going to ask what the name of a pillbug had anything to do with a vehicle, until the Keeper threw the door open, and her attention was caught by the outside. The sky here was a purplish black, in some places a darker purple than she thought could technically exist on the color spectrum. Webs of blue light and bands of lighter purple snaked through space in every direction, illuminating everything evenly. She looked down, and swallowed with sudden vertigo. There was no ground. That wasn't the sky, that was space, and this entire gallery was floating in it. But it wasn't space as she understood space to truly be, from her studies – actual space was a vacuum, saturated with magic in an aura around the Earth that steadily grew weaker until it passed the sun and the moon, where it dissipated and left cold nothingness. This space was full of dense, almost viscous magic, magic that felt like it might flow like ketchup, but when she tried to manipulate it with her horn, it gave her what felt like an electric jolt and then made her feel jittery, like she'd had several cups of coffee. There was far, far more magic here than in Equestria, and it was far stronger, but there seemed to be very little reining it in. The tiniest spark could set it off and make it do... anything, she thought, and shivered.

Then a creature loomed out of nowhere, appearing as a tiny spot and expanding to enormous size very rapidly. It would have looked as if it had zoomed in quickly had it been pointed toward the gallery, but its long side was parallel to the doorway. Also, Twilight had been touching the magic of the area at the time, and had sensed the local field being disrupted before it had appeared. It was gray, and insectoid, looking like... a giant pillbug. If pillbugs had soft gray fuzz on their armored plates, and giant,  non-insectoid, spherical white eyes with eyelids and pupils, and windows in the armored plates that showed an interior roughly similar to a train car. It waved its antenna feverishly in the air.

"Is... that... the Skalboggan?" Twilight asked uneasily, backing up.

"INDEED. THE SKALBOGGAN WILL TAKE YOU TO A LOCATION WHICH MAY OR MAY NOT ALSO CONTAIN BRUSHBALL DISCORD. SIMPLY STEP INTO ITS MOUTH." Said mouth yawned wide open, revealing a plush, almost silken carpet and a quarter-domed room with a matching silk pattern hung on the walls/ceiling (the quarter-hemisphere shape of the room made it impossible to tell where the walls stopped and the ceiling started.) 

"A-are you sure it's safe?" Twilight backed away from the door some more, now that the Skalboggan had rotated itself slightly to line its mouth up with the door. "That's a mouth."

"YES, THAT IS HOW ONE GAINS TRANSPORT ABOARD THE SKALBOGGAN. IT IS PERFECTLY SAFE. CHAOS WHICH CAUSES DEATH IS ENTROPY AND ENTROPY LEADS TO HOMOGENEITY, WHICH DOES NOT THEN CHANGE. ONLY CHAOS THAT RESULTS IN CONTINUING CHANGE IS WORTHWHILE CHAOS."

Twilight wondered if Discord had ever been the leader of a cult, or something. The Keeper seemed to have all kinds of interesting opinions about chaos that she'd almost certainly gotten from Discord, but Discord didn't seem to be interested in teaching anypony the "true meaning of chaos" in his opinion anymore. "It won't... eat me or something?"

"THE SKALBOGGAN EATS ONLY UNCOOKED SPAGHETTI, AND OCCASIONALLY THE WAILING SOULS OF THE EVIL DEAD. AS THOU ART NEITHER DEAD, NOR SPAGHETTI, AND HAST SHOWN ME NO SIGN OF EVIL THUS FAR, I PRESUME THEE TO BE SAFE."

That... was probably not as reassuring as the Keeper had intended it to be, but Twilight decided to take it in the spirit that it was given.  "Oookay, then." Hesitantly she stepped forward, horn at the ready just in case anything happened. 

The interior of the Skalboggan's mouth smelled like dirt, but as soon as she passed through the doorway in the back of its throat into the carriage, the scent became orange mint. By now Twilight had stopped looking for explanations for anything, and simply sat down on a cushion by the window. "Skalboggan, could you take me to Discord?"

The Skalboggan meowed, loudly. 

And then Twilight felt space warp around her. She gasped, feeling the thick magic of this chaotic dimension flowing past like they were somehow riding on top of it. Nothing was visible through the windows but bands of bright blue and dark purple, fluctuating wildly. Unconsciously she braced herself against the floor, hooves grasping against smooth chitin. 

Suddenly they came to a stop. Or rather the space around them seemed to come to a stop, because there was no inertia, no jerk forward or backward, either when the Skalboggan had started moving or when it stopped. It meowed again, and the door she had come through irised open.

"Uh, thanks, Skalboggan," Twilight said. "Have a nice day!" Did they even have days and nights in this land of chaos? Twilight stepped out and through a strange door that seemed to be halfway up a wall, on a purple and vermilion stuccoed building with a roof that was plainly made of overlapping shingles of cheese. She tripped as she entered, fell several heads, landed hard on a smooth plaster floor, and found herself in a room that was upside down. There was a comfy couch and tall lamp shaped like Discord himself sitting neatly on the ceiling, along with some end tables holding equally gravity-defying bric-a-brac, and nothing on the floor but a fan. The fan blades were actual palm fronds, spinning slowly. 

There was no clear way out of the room. The doorways were a few heads above her. There seemed to be a skylight in the floor, but fish were swimming in it. Even the windows didn't quite reach low (high?) enough for her to get out through one. And of course there was no sign of Discord anywhere. Because that would have involved the universe allowing things to be convenient for Twilight Sparkle for a single split second, and obviously that couldn't be allowed.

A sudden rage at all things chaos overwhelmed Twilight. She stomped her hooves, pawing at the floor and snorting in frustration. This entire day had just been the most utterly irritating thing ever, and when she found Discord she was going to punch him in the face twice. Once for taking her books and once for subjecting her to all of this nonsense. There was nothing in the room, nopony or creature to be harmed, so she lashed out, taking out her anger by firing her magic into the air around her, not even particularly aiming at anything.

Something ripped, something that felt like a thing that should never be ripping, something that felt too basic and bedrock to reality to ever rip, and then there was a portal gaping in front of her, looking out over a sunny garden full of singing flowers, of every possible color, all singing different songs at the same time, and she was pretty sure none of them were in key. A glowing sun-like smiling foal head drifted in the sky above the flowers, giggling, every so often chased by a bone-white horsehead. Twilight was no expert on horses – she actually found them a little bit creepy, given how similar they looked to ponies but without intelligence and language, and with their eyes on either side of their head rather than pointing forward like pony eyes -- but she thought the horsehead was probably a mare's.  

She took a deep breath. The portal she'd inadvertently created didn't seem to be causing reality to collapse, any more than it was already collapsing in this place of chaos anyway. The sight outside the portal was freaky, but standard Discord-level freaky, not "space and time are imploding" level. And the fact that she could make portals implied... well, that she could make portals.

Twilight tried to replicate what she'd done, deliberately. It took some doing; she hadn't been carefully tracking what she'd been doing the first time, and hadn't in any way expected a random firing of her horn to tear a hole in the fabric of space. When she finally got it, she managed to tear another, smaller portal... which was a good thing, because it looked like she'd placed this one in a body of water, and it started pouring water through the hole, along with very strange creatures that looked like frog-fish, as if a tadpole had been caught halfway through metamorphosis, where they had frog heads and forelegs, but a fish-like back end. Worried for the sake of the wildlife, Twilight tried to seal the portal, but somehow just ended up creating another one, so the water was now pouring out from the one portal into another, where she could see it gracefully dropping a couple of yards before splooshing onto a tiled floor. It looked as if she'd somehow managed to dump the water in a bathroom, at least – a literal bathroom, there was no visible toilet but there was a huge, deep, sunken bathtub that was almost large enough to be a swimming pool. 

The next portal Twilight created sent wind gusting through the room she was in, blowing some of the water off course to splatter on the floor/ceiling below her. She managed to make another portal directly in front of it for the wind to blow into. The first portal seemed to be coming from a forest of shiny pinwheels, all spinning and glittering in the stiff breeze; the second one led to the empty purple and blue space the Skalboggan had flown (through? On? Was flown even the right verb? It had almost felt like it was surfing). 

She was getting the hang of this now. Space itself seemed tissue-thin somehow; magic that would simply dissipate into the air in Equestria was actually breaking holes in the fabric of space, here. Teleportation ought to be an absolute breeze, here, if it weren't for the fact that she didn't know where anything was and couldn't possibly visualize a destination and had no idea where she was in relation to home, so she couldn't teleport there, either. But she was beginning to get a vague sense of what was behind the portals she was ripping before she ripped them – something about the way the space felt. The space around the water hole had felt heavy and thick – full, like a soaked sponge. The area with the pinwheels and the strong winds felt... more chaotic than other places did, but only on the surface. Like ripples on the top of a pond rather than waves in the ocean. She had a good idea that she didn't want to open up a portal anyplace where the other side felt like an ocean of chaos. 

Here was a place that felt... warm. She couldn't describe it any other way. Warm like friction, not warm like heat; space that was rubbed a lot. That didn't really make any sense, but then, none of this really made any sense, so Twilight tried opening a portal to the warm frictiony space, and found herself looking into a room full of fluffy, multicolored clouds, perches everywhere, and windows. Lots and lots of disembodied windows, floating in the air.

Windows. Hmm. Space that was "rubbed" – maybe, space that was trafficked? Space that had other portals in it? Stable portals that Discord had built and maybe one of them led to him or maybe one of them led home? Yes! Twilight pranced through the portal triumphantly... and discovered that it sealed up behind her. Huh. She wondered if they always did that.

The clouds weren't clouds. She could tell because she wasn't a pegasus, but she could still sit on them. They lay on the ground, the walls and the ceiling, or floated in midair, some parallel to the ground, some perpendicular. There were also perches all over, rising up from the ground, sticking out of the wall, hanging from the ceiling. There were swings, and smooth but irregularly bumpy poles like polished, barkless tree branches. There were also empty popcorn boxes everywhere, and food spills on every available surface.

But the thing that drew Twilight's attention, once she got over the yuck factor of the sticky floor enough to actually look up, were the windows. There were windows looking out over Ponyville, and Cloudsdale, and Canterlot, Manehattan and Baltimare and the Everfree Forest, and a lot of places Twilight didn't recognize. There were windows looking out over mountain vistas where full-grown dragons wheeled in the air, and windows looking out over cold, frozen lands. Many of the windows showed creatures she didn't think existed anywhere on Earth, strange monkey-like bipeds with manes but no coats, wearing clothing, doing things like getting into carriages that seemed to pull themselves with magic, or going into tall buildings like the ones in Manehattan, or arguing with each other. There was also a window showing a cold lunar vista like the kind she had seen in paintings Princess Luna had done, with the Earth rising on a black horizon in the distance. Some other windows, Twilight deliberately did not give more than a single swift glance to before determining that whatever it was they were looking in on, she didn't want to see it. While this chaos world she was exploring was playing fast and loose with many of the laws of physics, at least angles were shaped correctly and space didn't seem to be doing things like overlapping itself.

All of the windows were silent. She tapped one with her hoof, one looking into Canterlot Palace, and jumped back when sound emerged from it. It was viewing Princess Celestia's audience chamber, and she was apparently having her usual daily court session. Somepony was going on and on about how she wanted there to be a law to keep foals safe from 'those creatures'. Princess Celestia's expression was full-on ceramic smile, none of the usual sincerity or warmth she had in her face. Whatever it was this mare wanted, it was actually making the Princess angry. Twilight had never seen that ceramic, empty mask directed at her – there was always real emotion and warmth in Princess Celestia's face for her, even when she was angry or frightened – but she'd seen enough court sessions to know what that meant.

"Princess! Princess Celestia! Can you hear me?" she shouted at the window, but suspected it wasn't going to work even as she tried it. Neither Celestia nor the guards nor any of the ponies in the audience chamber turned around or even flicked their ears. Of course Discord would want the freedom to chortle at the goings-on and make fun of ponies without any of them being able to hear him; the windows had to be one-way only.

But something unexpected happened. One of the other windows was looking out at the counter of an empty Sugarcube Corner, with Pinkie Pie doing something with the display to rearrange the cakes, and no customers present. Pinkie hopped up over the counter and yelled, "Hiiii, Twilight! Is that you?"

Twilight jumped, startled. The window with Sugarcube Corner was close to the Canterlot window, floating just a head or two away from it and not significantly higher than it either. "Pinkie?"

Pinkie bounded up to the window – which had to be impossible, those "windows" had to be invisible warps in space because one of them was overlooking her library, empty and dark because she wasn't in it, and if there had been anything visible to eyes or magic she would have seen it, but Pinkie obviously knew exactly where the window was because she somehow managed to press her muzzle against it, peering in. "Twilight, you silly, what are you doing in Discord's house?"

"Pinkie, how can you hear me?"

"I guess 'cause you're being loud! I heard you calling Princess Celestia. She's not at Discord's house with you, is she?"

"No, she's at court. Wait a minute, what time is it? How is Princess Celestia at court?"

"Well, the sun came up an hour ago, so it's court time, I guess. We just finished the morning breakfast rush and now it's gonna be kind of dead for a while until the shops open and then we'll get the second big rush!"

I've been wandering around Discord's dimension all night? It hadn't felt that long; maybe there was some sort of temporal distortion going on, too. Or maybe, judging from the growling in her stomach, it really had taken her that long to get here. "Discord's been stealing my books, Pinkie. I traced the teleport back to its source when he grabbed the books, and I ended up in some kind of... I don't know how to describe it except a closet dimension. Like he had huge piles of books, and clothes, and big disorganized piles of all kinds of junk."

Pinkie's eyes went huge. "You actually went to manespace? Wow!"

"Um..." Twilight had no idea how to handle that question, so she ignored it. "Anyway, I eventually found my way to this room full of weird windows, one of which was looking at Princess Celestia's court, and another was looking at you. You can see the window?"

"Sure! Can't you?"

"Well, I can from here, but I don't think I'd be able to see it from the other side..."

"You just have to squint your eyes just right! Like this!" Pinkie said, squinting. "So have you found Discord yet?"

"No, and it's getting really frustrating! I've been at this all night!"

"Why don't you come home and we can have Fluttershy call him for you and then she can help you yell at him?"

"How can Fluttershy – wait, did he give her some special way to contact him besides the summoning spell?"

"There's a summoning spell?"

"Yeah, but we'd have to use it with the Elements to actually summon him; if I just cast it without the Elements, it's like knocking on his door, but he doesn't have to answer. Princess Celestia taught it to me after Fluttershy reformed him."

"Well, I think he gave Fluttershy a way to contact him but I don't know what it is but maybe it's just that he visits her a lot because she talks like she can see him any time she wants to but maybe that just means she sees him a lot?"

"I don't think I can come home so easily anyway. Even though I can see you, I can't – I can't map out the connection between where I am and where you are so I can safely teleport."

"You don't need to teleport! Just climb through the window, silly filly!"

Twilight had learned enough trust in Pinkie's ridiculous ideas that she actually tried. "There's a barrier, Pinkie. I can't get through the window."

"Oh, right, of course, it's a closed window! Lemme see if I can get it open from this side!"

What followed was the spectacle of Pinkie trying for several minutes to lift nothing from the bottom of the window, slide nothing from the side of the window, push nothing down from the top of the window, and push and pull at nothing from the middle of the window. She was plainly miming the movements it would take to open a window without being able to see how the window actually opened. Twilight tried feeling around the edges of the window with magic and with her hooves, but couldn't find anything that might indicate an opening mechanism, even a magical one. 

She sighed, finally. Pinkie, panting and sweating out of proportion to the physical effort she'd actually been demonstrating, was still struggling to "open" the window. "Never mind, Pinkie," she said. "I don't think Discord made it so it could be opened."

Pinkie sagged. "Sorry, Twilight, I tried really hard but I think you're right, I just can't get it open." Her ears drooped, then perked up. "But maybe I can get some-thing to go through, even if some-pony can't!" Before Twilight could figure out what she was talking about, she bounced over to the counter and grabbed a cupcake.

"Pinkie, I don't think that will—" Pinkie put her hoof through the window, holding the cupcake, as if the window wasn't even there. On Twilight's side, the cupcake appeared to be floating in air right in front of the window, with no sign of Pinkie's hoof. "Pinkie, are you ok? I can't see your hoof!"

"Yeah, I'm really stretching! Take it, Twilight, I can't keep stretching like this!"

Twilight took the cupcake. "How can you get a thing through but not a pony? Portals don't work that way! Either it lets something through or it doesn't, but it's like a doorway that's either open or shut!"

"That's a portal. This is a window. Big difference!"

Note to self: Pinkie seems to have a more intuitive understanding of how Discord's chaos magic works than I do. Figure out how! Somehow. "If you can push things through... I'm really grateful for the cupcake, Pinkie, because I'm kind of starving here, I've been wandering around this place all night... but I ran into a room made of pudding before, so the only thing I have had to eat was really sugary. I don't suppose you have anything you can give me that isn't full of sugar? Even just some hay or something."

"Oh, I've got just the thing!" Pinkie bounced back over to the counter, pulled a pie out from the display, and came back. "This is a savory mushroom potato pie we made for the lunch rush, but there's enough time before lunch to make another one, so you can have it and I'll just ring it up as I bought it!"

"I don't want to put you out or cost you a lot of bits—"

"Don't worry about it! You're on an important mission! The Cakes will understand! How are Pumpkin and Pound ever going to learn to read if Discord steals all the books from the library?"

It seemed highly unlikely to Twilight, now that she'd seen Discord's giant book pile, that he would have any interest in stealing books for pre-literate foals, but on the other hand, it was an important mission to recover Ponyville's library books and she was glad somepony was acknowledging that. Besides, she was really, really hungry. The cupcake made her mouth water, but she knew better than to eat a cupcake if there was a more solidly meal-like option available. "I only really need a slice or two of pie, I don't need the whole thing."

"Take it anyway, it's easier to push a whole thing through a window than a part of a thing!"

Bemused, Twilight took the pie when Pinkie pushed it through the window. How did that even make sense? 

"Do you want me to tell Fluttershy to tell Discord that he better get you out of there and also return all the books?"

For a moment the thought was tempting; her primary strategy for getting home, so far, had been to find Discord and demand he do it, and Fluttershy admittedly had better leverage over him than Twilight did. On the other hand, needing to be rescued by her friends' intervention, when she was still so angry at Discord and wanted so badly to give him a piece of her mind directly, didn't sit well with her. She'd much rather find Discord and harangue him into taking her home than depend on Fluttershy's sweetness and kindness... it wasn't that Fluttershy's strategy wasn't dependable, it was that Twilight really didn't feel like being sweet and kind with Discord, or relying on anyone else to be. 

"Give me another day to find Discord and give him a piece of my mind, and if I'm not back by tomorrow, then have Fluttershy make him bring me back."

"Okie dokie lokie!"

"I'm going to go eat this great pie you gave me, and then I'm going to go find Discord. See you tomorrow at the latest, Pinkie!"

"See ya!" Pinkie bounced away and into the back, presumably to replace the mushroom pie, which turned out to be absolutely delicious. It had savory daffodil bulbs and cheddar cheese and all sorts of herbs and spices. Twilight ended up eating more than half of it. Well, she'd been burning a lot of magic here.

Now to resume the search for Discord.