Not The Hero

by alarajrogers


A Cheesy Encounter

I be-eat Gilda! I be-eat Gilda! Nanny nanny boo boo! Take that, you stuck-up griffin! Booyah!

Yeah, okay, this has nothing to do with my quest to defeat Anon, but it's making me very happy. I spent the last two hours dancing around the Grotto of Disharmony, singing victory songs (Gilda claims that my singing ability, or lack thereof, makes her ears bleed, but I checked and there is no blood. Besides, would you really expect the Spirit of Disharmony, who happens to be named Discord, to sing well? Anyway, I like my own singing! I'm very free and creative about what key I'm in, and I'm very avant-garde and experimental about pitch. Why should songs always hit the same notes that they were written with anyway? I'd think she'd be more concerned about the celebratory fireworks and the party cannons. I got the idea from Pinkie Pie but mine have actual cannonballs that explode.) I can't quite decide on a decorating scheme – I've done carnival, nightclub, discotheque, rave, and gala – so I think I'm just going to mix them all together.

Gilda's opinion of all this: "You were supposed to beat me, you dumbshit, that's why we were training you! You're like three times bigger than me!" She keeps saying that, but I really don't think her numbers tie out. I tried duplicating her twice, and when I stacked them on top of her, the three of them were taller than me. Also irritated with me for stacking them, and duplicating them in the first place.

She's still fast, but I'm re-learning moves I haven't needed in two thousand years, things that once upon a time I did with my body and not magic because I didn't have as much magic to burn as I do nowadays. When she came in on a dive, going for my neck (again... does she think I have no other vulnerable spots?), I twisted like a pretzel, swiveling my upper body so I was facing her, and I grabbed her before she had a chance to land on me. She almost got free – griffins are strong, and she's really wiggly – but then I got my tail around her, and well, that was it. My tail's actually stronger than my arms and legs, because unlike a pony tail it's really an extension of my core body, not an appendage at all. Also it has dragon scales, so it's pretty impervious to anything a griffin can do to it.

So now I am celebrating, and irritating the living daylights out of Gilda, who is not at all happy that I'm making such a big thing out of my win, but come on! This might be the first time I've beaten anyone in combat without my magic ever!

Okay, no, there was that bar fight on the planet full of humans and alien creatures with no counterparts on Equestria, but while I did take down two guys on my own with a chair, mostly I just tricked the bar patrons into fighting each other by ducking out of the way of a belligerent drunk's swing in just such a way that it would hit a different belligerent drunk. Also, I was wearing a human body, and I believe I've mentioned at length how much a human body does not compare to my own.

Oh, and then there was the time I fought off the long-ma who couldn't figure out that underneath my gorgeous feminine kimono and elaborate makeup job I was actually male. I might even have agreed to sleep with him if he hadn't wanted to lock me in his harem and have his babies, which, even if I'd been in a female form, no. And I was in the past and couldn't afford to use my magic because Eris was active back then and chaos avatars follow the philosophy that there can be only one. And Eris started a war that devastated two nations because sometaur didn't invite her to a party, so I definitely did not want to have to fight her. But, you know, he was a lot bigger and stronger than me – one of the major differences between draconequui and long-ma is that we're smaller on average, or were back when we existed – so I might not have won that one without magic if I hadn't been able to trick him into agreeing to a blow job. Hopefully he wasn't originally destined to father a whole lot of kids before I interfered in the timeline, but nothing seems too terribly messed up here in the future, so I guess it was all right.

Anyway, this is the first time I've won a fight without my magic in a very, very long time. So I think that's worth celebrating! So sue me!

...All right, all right.  I'll give it to Gilda, she's getting stuff done. Right at this moment, Applejack is trapped in a net that's hanging over a gorge from what looks like a flimsy tree branch. Actually I've enchanted it for Gilda so that the net isn't actually able to fall. Once the ponies figure out that the net Gilda bagged Applejack in is actually floating, they'll know that I'm behind this, but they would have figured that out already because they know Gilda helped me, the day they ambushed me. The really neat thing about the kidnapping of Applejack, though, is that Anon wasn't able to stop it.

So here's what Gilda did. (I have no problem having my minions gloat to me about their plans after those plans have been realized; I just don't want to know what they intend to do before they do it.) She hired a bunch of Diamond Dog mercenaries to kidnap Rarity. Anon, of course, set off in hot pursuit to rescue Rarity, and while he was occupied being Rarity's big hero, Gilda lured Applejack onto a net trap, which bagged her. Applejack's strong, but I reinforced that net, and she's not stupid; once Gilda had her airborne, she stopped struggling.

I've told Gilda not to engage Anon; he's too dangerous. Once he shows up to rescue Applejack, she needs to run. She argued with me about this, saying that she didn't want to look like a coward in front of Rainbow Dash, but I pointed out that Anon would defeat her and I couldn't trust him not to kill her.

The point to this is simply to harass Anon. Keep him moving, keep him having to do things. Let him tire himself out. I don't know if his power weakens if he's tired (I don't actually know if he can get tired, but he does sleep, so I assume so.) But boy wouldn't I like to find out. Also, let Anon and the Bearers spin their wheels trying to figure out what my larger plan was here, because obviously the spirit of Chaos has a devious and complex plan and wouldn't just kidnap two ponies for the heck of it! Why, that wouldn't make any sense!

You laugh, but I have actually heard things like this come out of their mouths, while using the Panauricon to spy on them.

Anyway. While she's doing that, I'm off to find a blue unicorn, now that I'm more or less done with my victory celebration. Just a couple more noodle bananas and I'm out of here.


So here's some fun facts you didn't know. Unless you're Celestia, in which case don't you think it would be a good idea to share this kind of information with somepony? Like, I don't know, maybe your trusted student? Or are you reluctant to let her know exactly how often your special students go crazy?

It turns out that alicorns are not fertile after their initial pony lifetime passes – so, if an alicorn wants to be a momma, she's gotta do it within her first 80 years or so. (At least, this is true of alicorn mares. No one knows anything about alicorn stallions because they're so rare; in my entire lifetime there's been only one.) Most of the time, alicorns are made, not born; there's no such thing as an "alicorn race". Alicorn mommies can have alicorn babies if the daddy is a sufficiently powerful pony of any race (yes, pegasi and earth ponies have magical power too... unicorns like to forget this, but tell me Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie are doing what they do without magic and I will follow you around with a laugh track giggling hysterically at everything you say for the next day or so), but mothers of other races cannot birth alicorns even if the father is one (and he almost never is, due to the aforementioned only one male alicorn in my lifetime. Ra the Sunbearer, who I've kind of avoided meeting because of his jealous boyfriend being a fellow chaos avatar and the aforementioned territorial behavior we exhibit when we meet another one intruding on our domain, was a male alicorn, and had kids, I think, but Set's memories in my head are even more jumbled than most of the memories I get from my predecessors due to his time under the control of Apep, also known as the Nightmare Forces. I'm not even 100% on Set having had kids; Baast claimed that Anubis was Set's son, but my access to Set's memories is too confused for me to confirm this, though I suppose I could do so if I really cared, which I don't.)

Anyway. Celestia and I agreed way back when that we wouldn't have kids; she'd save it for whoever she eventually married. I'm not fertile with ponies unless I use magic (not that I personally have ever done so, but I've run into close cognates who have), and up until our unfortunate misunderstanding involving mutual belief in exaggerated rumors of the other one's death (ok, mine weren't exaggerated, I confess), I'm pretty sure she was exclusive with me. During the years she was fighting me, I'm sure she felt things were too unstable for her to be able to afford to have kids. And after I was in stone, she found out the bad news about no bouncing baby Tias, ever. (Or Woonas. I had some pretty hilarious commentary on that with Luna – since she and I are both dreamwalkers, she was the only one I could talk to. I could visit the dreams of other ponies and observe them, but they couldn't see me. Luna could. Not that she appreciated my wit.) At the time, though, the sisters had each other, and Celestia had been sublimating her desire for foals into teaching youthful unicorns for centuries, while she was trying and failing to train up somepony who could stand against me, or help her and Luna do it.

This changed when Luna took her all-expenses-paid vacation to the moon. Suddenly Celestia was alone. And while she's always been very, very good at making friends, the thing about being an immortal alicorn is that your friends die. (Not a problem for me, despite my being equally immortal; I just avoid having any. Disharmony means never having to cry at a friend's funeral! After all the ones Celestia has cried at, you'd think she'd find my perspective more appealing.) So she set out to create another alicorn. Since she and Luna elevated each other by somehow managing to botch one of Starswirl's completely botched spells in a different direction than he had ever managed to botch it, and since my poor little Brightest Star had managed to make herself the Alicorn of Chaos by making up a ritual involving almost killing me (the intent was not for it to be 'almost', but well, I'm hard to kill and even harder to keep tied up on your sacrificial slab), she knew it could be done, and she knew it could go very badly but she wanted to do it anyway. That's the kind of selfish hypocrisy I truly love about my Tia. I'm not being sarcastic here; she tries so hard to convince the world of how perfect she is, but deep down inside she's a mare like any other and she makes stupid decisions that could destroy the world in order to satisfy her personal emotional needs, all the time. And I love that about her.

So she started taking personal students. Approximately four or five every century. She didn't stick solely to unicorns, either. Most of her students led largely unexceptional lives; they were talented, they did interesting things, but nothing that goes down in the history books. About one in five of them went spectacularly crazy in some way; the most recent example of this ran off after finding out Celestia wasn't going to let her just turn into an alicorn and refusing to listen when Celestia tried to explain that that's not how it works, and jumped into a magic mirror that sent her to another dimension someplace. I think it might have been one of Starswirl's attempts to contain and regulate one of my portals, but I was stone at the time so the details were hard to get. They didn't all go crazy in a bad way, even by Tia's standards – Professor Steamhead and her insistence that Equestria could be saved through the power of steam actually kick-started Equestrian industrialization, proving that various useful devices such as trains can be powered by earth ponies with shovels rather than unicorn magic. But Celestia puts her students under a great deal of pressure, and some of them crack.

Of those students, four became alicorns. Three of those alicorns are now dead, and when you consider that alicorns are supposed to be immortal, that says a lot right there. (The fourth one, the Alicorn of Desolation, won't stay in Equestria because there's no true desolation in Equestria, though she sometimes visits the Badlands, so she too was a failure from the perspective of Tia's quest for an immortal friend and confidante.) The Alicorn of Nature chose to die because she wanted to rejoin the natural cycle of life and death. The Alicorn of Righteous Anger, predictably, died during a war. And the Alicorn of Honor, also the only male alicorn in two thousand years, also the only one of the bunch who started out as a unicorn, fell, the same way Luna did, and was corrupted semi-permanently into a dark magic addict and madpony who changed his color scheme from white and gold to... I hesitate even to say this, the horror that it may evoke in the mind of the unprepared being enough to give even me pause... black and red. Oh, the equinity!

I could have seen it coming the moment he recognized that his Concept, the principle he as an alicorn connected to, was Honor. In fact I did see it coming, but Woony was loony and on the moony at the time, so I couldn't exactly warn anypony... not that I would have. Just because I can't eat the popcorn doesn't mean I can't entertain myself imagining popcorn to eat. Of all concepts that ponies value, I gotta say that Honor is probably the absolute worst. I realize you're taking this with an entire salt lick, coming from me, but this is objectively true. I mean, I also hate Honesty, but Honesty at least is awfully useful in establishing your bona fides as someone who's trustworthy, so when you really need to be able to lie, everypony will believe you. And Loyalty is a crock, but mostly because it doesn't go both ways; what good did being loyal to Celestia ever do me? And oh yes, I was, enough that when the Tree was stupid enough to offer me Elements to try to co-opt me, the ones it offered were Laughter and, haha, Loyalty. They both ended up going to Luna, also bearer of Honesty, who turned on her sister slash best friend, after lying to her for months, and who now doesn't remember what the word fun means. I am not making this up. Ask Pinkie Pie. So, you know, the track record of the Tree of Harmony isn't great.

But Honor is a lie. A hilarious lie that's amazingly good at infecting ponies and making them stupid, and for that I suppose I enjoy it, but there's some small part of me that wants to believe ponies are smarter than they are that winces every time I see it in action. To be precise, I don't mean honor as in integrity, the sense of not being a hypocrite. I mean Honor, the thing that encourages intelligent beings to throw their lives away in pointless wars, that allows the ponies of Neighpon to have believed for centuries that killing yourself to avoid having to carry out an order you find reprehensible was a better idea than just refusing, that kept the dragons psychologically incapable of surrendering and stopping their invasion of Equestria and forced me to have to kill or drive irrevocably mad nearly every single one of them. The kind of Honor that leads ponies to duel each other to the death over an insult. (And ponies are among the most resistant to the excesses of Honor of all the species I've encountered. Dragons and minotaurs and griffins are much, much, much worse.) Fighting for Honor almost always boils down to "fighting to make my nation or tribe look good."

There's a story my mother once told me, and I know I've pointed out that draconequui weren't, as a general rule, particularly chaotic, but I doubt they could have produced me if they hadn't had some reverence for chaos. In the story, a dire wolf and a pony get into a fight. The pony challenges the dire wolf to a duel, and loses, and the wolf eats him. A coyote has something rude to say about this, so the wolf challenges the coyote to a duel. And the night before the duel, the coyote sets the wolf's house on fire. The story was told to be comic, with an image of a wolf in a nightgown and underpants racing out of a burning house, yipping, as flames lick at his booties and the edges of his gown. The point was very clear, though. My mother would have agreed with me, and presumably if that was a story draconequus mothers told their children, she wouldn't have been the only one. Honor is an excuse to kill without reason, and a reason to die stupidly. If someone wants to kill you for the sake of their honor, don't play along with them – fight them on a different ground.

The Alicorn of Honor believed in his own total righteousness, in the absoluteness of his cause, which was nothing more than his belief that he should be Celestia's superior because she was merely the Alicorn of the Sun, which is a concept that lacks a moral valence, but Honor is Good and therefore he deserved to rule. Yes, this is stupid. Everything about Honor is stupid. Celestia couldn't do much about it except fight him; she didn't have the use of the Elements anymore, so there were neither magical banishment nor magical purification available to her as options. But in their final battle, she managed to get through to him, and made him recognize how dishonorable he was being by turning on his teacher and ruler. In the brief moment when he felt that his original personality was in control, he tore his own magic out and poured it into an amulet he'd been using as a battery for extra magical storage. And then he activated rune-based spells – since he'd just purged himself of all of his own magic – by cutting open his veins and bleeding out his life force, which is often the way you need to activate runes if you don't have enough practitioners with enough magic to turn them on – to seal the magic away.

Celestia, in a marvelous display of the tremendous self-control and foresight that we've all come to expect of her... drop-kicked the amulet into orbit, in fury and grief that her student was dead. Because, of course, the Alicorn of Proximate Stellar Dynamics apparently had no notion of the concept that orbits decay and that a magical amulet can't be trusted to burn up on re-entry. It landed a few decades later and immediately started wreaking havoc. The spells that the Alicorn of Honor wove around it with the last of his life force prevent the magic from escaping or leaking, but there's a catch, of course. If a pony puts on the amulet of their own free will, they can tap the magic within, and once that happens, it can only be removed if the pony dies or voluntarily gives the amulet up.

Now, I've said that magic has a personality, and that raw magic is essentially a ferret on pixie stix and triple espresso. Raw magic is emotionally volatile, constantly shifting, but is mostly positive – curious, energetic and happy to be doing magical things that are fun. Dark magic also has a personality, and it is not the same one. Dark magic, in general, dwells on anger, humiliation, jealousy, self-pity... dark magic is angry at everything, and wants to make absolutely sure that you know to respect its authoritay. And the magic of the Alicorn Amulet, in particular, is the magic of Honor turned bad. The Alicorn Amulet makes its wearers absolutely certain they are right – not in the sense of the Element of Arrogance, which makes the user convinced they are right and that others are stupid and should be laughed at, but in the sense that the Alicorn Amulet is right and any pony who is wrong should be humiliated utterly until they submit and admit how wrong they were, and generally they should be humiliated some more after that for being generally inferior. It is a recipe for turning a pony into a monster.

I caught up with Trixie Lulamoon as she was leaving the shop of a vendor of shady magical artifacts with the address of another such vendor who might or might not have the Alicorn Amulet available to sell her. As she stomped off in disappointment and determination, I created another small shady-magical-artifact shop and placed it by the side of the road she was walking down.

She ignored it.

I created another one, half a trot down the road from that. Trixie was so busy muttering to herself about how awful Twilight Sparkle was that she ignored that one too. So finally I just made one in the middle of the road, where she'd have to look up at it, at least, since it was in her way.

Trixie looked up at my sign (Magic R Us, with a backward R), scowled, started to go around, then swung back to scowl at it again. Finally she sighed, and went inside.

I was sitting there waiting for her, with a turban wrapped around my horns like they do in Bovinia. "Welcome, welcome, little pony!" I said, pitching my voice deep. "Is there something you seek? Here you can find many things."

She glanced around at the wide assortment of magical knickknacks I'd decorated the place with. "Trixie doubts that you have what she seeks," she said, arrogant to the point of being snooty. "But in the very unlikely case that you will not disappoint Trixie as she has been disappointed so many other times, Trixie is willing to ask if you have what she is looking for."

"Is it the letter I? Because I can hear that you're definitely missing that," I said in my normal tone of voice.

Trixie glared at me. "No, I am not missing the letter I," she spat out. "But the Great and Powerful Trixie has no need to use the word 'I'. It is diminishing, and Trixie is far too Great and Powerful to have need of it."

"Really? I always thought it was the other way around," I said. "I mean, anypony can refer to me as Discord, Awesomely Powerful and Handsome Lord of Chaos, but only I get to be that amazing individual." I leaned forward, turbanless, letting her get a good look at me for the first time. To her credit, Trixie did not run screaming. She took a step back, lighting her horn.

"Trixie has heard of you, chaos monster!" she declared. "If it is a fight you want, know that Trixie will not back down in a matter of magic!"

"Oh, please." I rolled my eyes. "It wouldn't be a fight, my dear, and I'm not interested in a conflict right now anyway. I'm interested in helping you."

"Trixie does not need help from the likes of you!"

"Maybe not, but I could certainly use your help, and I had thought we could be of mutual use to one another. But I suppose you're not interested in saving Equestria from a monster who has mind-controlled Twilight Sparkle, all of her friends, and the Princesses." I sighed. "It's too bad, I really thought you'd be up to the job."

"Wait. What is this? I've heard nothing of Twilight being mind-controlled."

"Of course not." I filed my talon nails. "You've been too busy stomping around searching for the Alicorn Amulet. What were you planning on doing with that thing once you got it?"

"Trixie intended to show Twilight Sparkle who is the better unicorn, once and for all!"

I choked, gasping. "With – with the Alicorn Amulet?" I started laughing hysterically. "That's like demonstrating how tough you are to your opponent by playing griffin roulette with six bullets and going first!"

Trixie scowled even more deeply. "The Great and Powerful Trixie does not need to listen to your insults," she said, and turned around, at which point she evidently realized that I had taken the door away. "Release Trixie at once, chaos monster!"

I teleported in front of her, floating, and waggled my talon at her. "Ah-ah-ah. It's not very nice to call someone a monster, especially when you're asking them for a favor. How about 'chaos demigod'? Or 'chaos lord'? I'll accept 'chaos beast' if you start it with the word 'sexy'. Or, you know, you could use my name. Which is Discord."

"Very well, Discord, release Trixie at once!"

"So you can do what? Go off, find the Alicorn Amulet, fall under its spell and lose yourself completely?"

She snorted. "The Great and Powerful Trixie is not some weak-willed simp to lose her mind to an Amulet. Trixie's will is strong enough to remain in control!"

I chortled at her. "You... you have no idea how the Alicorn Amulet works, do you?"

Trixie glared. "Trixie knows enough. Now release me!"

"It doesn't matter how powerful your will is. The Alicorn Amulet grants you power the way you grant a wagon you're pulling mobility. It isn't giving you power; you're giving the entity within it a body."

"Trixie would be able to resist any sort of alien interloper within her mind," she sniffed.

"Ah, but if you did successfully resist, you wouldn't get any power." I attached her to a carriage, bending space to make it fit in the small shop. Trixie yowled and used her magic to try to pry herself out of harness, but I had it on tight. "Behold! This carriage has been endowed with the power of a unicorn! Fear the carriage, and its mastery over magic!"

"It has no mastery over magic, you oaf," Trixie snarled. "It's just a carriage!"

"Ah, but it has the Great and Powerful Trixie harnessed to it! Now it's not a mere carriage – it's a unicorn-powered carriage!"

"It still can't go anywhere that I, the aforementioned Great and Powerful Trixie, don't drag it to," she said. "Assuming its wheels don't fall off."

"Yes, now you're getting my point." I snapped the carriage away. "The Alicorn Amulet will use you as a vessel. A carriage. Your will won't be in control; you won't even be conscious. And since the only way to remove it is for your body to die or for the entity within the Amulet to choose to remove it... it essentially means that if you put it on you're killing yourself. Maybe it will take itself off when it finds a younger, healthier host. You'll blink your eyes open after putting it around your neck and find that in that eyeblink you've transformed into an elderly, decrepit mare... and all the crimes it committed in your body would be on your head."

This was all a lie, in fact. There are artifacts that work like this, but the Alicorn Amulet isn't one of them. But I knew that Trixie wouldn't be swayed by explaining to her that no, she wouldn't be able to resist its corruption, that in fact she had exactly the sort of mindset and personality best suited for it to corrupt. While I strongly suspected that the obsession with upstaging Twilight Sparkle was Anon's doing – there are ponies petty enough to want to humiliate other ponies for saving their lives because they didn't want to be seen as somepony who had ever needed help, but they're rare, so this was more likely Anon at work – she really was a self-aggrandizing, pompous narcissist. Now, you may think that me being critical of ponies for being narcissists would be hypocritical, but it's not at all. Ponies who think the entire world revolves around them irritate me greatly, because in fact it revolves around me and they should recognize that fact. Who here is the avatar of a cosmic force and one of the fundamental underpinnings of magic on our world? That's right. Not Trixie. Besides, it's not so much the narcissism I object to as the pompous humorlessness. And either way, she was exactly the sort of target the dark, restless magic of the corrupted Alicorn of Honor would want to be channeled through.

"Then Trixie will have to find some other way," she said, after a moment of hesitation. "Twilight Sparkle must pay for all she's done to Trixie!"

"Which is what, precisely?"

This was obviously a litany she'd practices. "When Trixie went to Ponyville to perform, as she has done in many towns all throughout Equestria, several mares repeatedly challenged her, and she defeated them all with ease. They said over and over that Trixie was not the most Great and Powerful unicorn in Equestria, but that their friend Twilight Sparkle held that honor. However, Twilight cowardly refused to meet my challenge in the open, allowing the implication of her superiority to linger without the courage to prove herself directly! Then an ursa minor attacked the town, and of course Trixie was unable to stop it – no pony can stop an ursa! But Twilight Sparkle cheated, soothing the creature to sleep by enchanting the water in a water tower to taste like milk and giving it to the ursa cub."

"How is that cheating? It sounds to me like she saved the town. Including you, my dear."

"Yes, but..." She squirmed. "Trixie may have claimed that she had previously defeated an ursa major, as part of her show, and two young colts were so stupid that they believed in what had been up to that point a harmless exaggeration for the sake of the show. They woke the ursa precisely because they wished to see Trixie defeat it. Instead, Twilight did! But she didn't defeat it in combat; she put it to sleep, like an infant! Trixie was a laughingstock!"

I had to resist the temptation to ask her what she expected Twilight to do – let Ponyville be destroyed to preserve Trixie's dignity? She made her own bed, in my opinion; if you aren't the most awesome and powerful creature around, like I am, then you have no business pretending. But I needed her rage at Twilight to get her on my side, so I let it go. She continued. "Every town that Trixie traveled to laughed at her or ostracized her. Trixie's wagon was destroyed, with all of her life's possessions. I was forced to work on a rock farm to survive and stay fed! A rock farm!"

I shuddered. "Now that truly is a fate worse than death. If Twilight's actions condemned you to spending any time at all on a rock farm, I can certainly see why you'd want revenge." I eeled around her and put my eagle arm over her withers. "Which is why I am now your new best friend!"

She tossed her mane and pulled out of my grasp. "Trixie does not need anything so weak and sappy as friendship," she sneered.

"No, of course not. My feelings exactly. Buut, allies are always useful!" I put my arm around her again. "Besides, don't they say that the enemy of my enemy is my friend?"

"They may say so, but ignorant ponies say many things," Trixie said. "The enemy of my enemy could also be my enemy as well. Trixie has heard many things about you, Discord, none of them pleasant, and none of them incline me to ally with you."

"Even if I could give you a different amulet of power? One that won't take over your mind?"

Her eyes narrowed. "And why would you do this for Trixie?"

"I was thinking an alliance of mutual convenience." I landed on four feet. I've found that ponies find me slightly more trustworthy on all fours. "I know you don't trust me, but I think you'll find our goals are aligned. Twilight Sparkle is an enemy to both of us – and both of us want her to be at her best, to provide us with a real challenge. It hardly proves your worthiness to defeat a Twilight who's been rendered weak and stupider than she should be by the machinations of a mind-controlling alien, and I find there's no sport in such a match."

"This is the second time you've said this. How is Twilight Sparkle being mind-controlled?"

"Well. Did you know that she's fallen madly in love with an alien? A creature who looks like a monkey, only without a coat, so his skin's completely bare?"

"You're speaking of Anon. Of course Trixie has heard of him. He's a well-known hero of the realm."

"That's what he wants everypony to think. But I know the truth."

"What is the truth? Tell Trixie!" She shoved her muzzle into my face, her expression part determination, part indignation.

I didn't answer her right away; I stood up and paced. "Trixie, you're a showmare. You know all about telling a story. You know how to make yourself the hero of the story, and how to assign others in the story lesser roles that back you up but never overshadow you. Am I right?"

"Of course. Trixie is a performer nonpareil. If I didn't know how to do those things I would have been laughed out of stagecraft years ago. Why are you bringing this up?"

"Imagine that a part of your mind has been granted the power to make your stories come true. Imagine that everypony you've assigned the role of sidekick or villain in one of your more, shall we say, creative tales, was really bound into that role. Imagine that any mate you desired would instantly fall in love with you."

"Trixie has neither the time nor the patience for romantic entanglements."

"Good for you. But that isn't my point. Now imagine that somepony else has that power. Someone who isn't you. Someone who can make themselves the hero of every story. Who really can vanquish an ursa just because they want to and it would make them look cool, regardless of how senseless that is. Someone who makes every other being who comes into contact with him a sidekick, a love interest, or a villain. And he's not you. So no matter how Great and Powerful you want to present yourself as... he'll upstage you every time. And if he thinks you're attractive enough, he'll make you fall in love with him while he's doing it."

Trixie shook her head. "Nopony could do that! Trixie is far too strong—"

"Stronger than the Princesses? Because he's done it to them. And I hate to tell you this, Trixie, but you're nowhere near as powerful as I am... and he's done it to me. I've fought him on more than one occasion—and every time, he makes me stupid. He makes me careless. He makes me unoriginal. Would you like to be forced into being a caricature of yourself?" I snapped my fingers, creating an illusion that illustrated my words as I spoke. "I'm pretty sure I know what he'll do to you, if you fight him, even with the Alicorn Amulet. He'll make you fail. He'll make himself and every one of his marefriends defeat you, ignominiously, humiliating you utterly. Everything you try to do, they will do better. And then either he'll kill you or make you wish you were dead... or if he thinks you're attractive, he'll make you want to fall to your knees and beg forgiveness from him and all six of his marefriends. And then if you're very lucky, you'll get to join their herd as a junior wife, forced to throw yourself heart and soul into proving how much you love them all and how badly you want to prove yourself 'reformed'."

"That would never happen," Trixie said, but her voice wasn't as vehement as before. "Trixie would never—"

"—be given a choice," I finished her sentence for her. "Any more than I'm given a choice, when I have to face him. When you enter his story – which includes anytime you want to challenge any of his marefriends – you're forced to conform to it. He warps minds and probabilities." I leaned down into her face. "There is one thing that might give you some protection. And by coincidence, it happens to be the thing I'm interested in offering you."

Trixie rolled her eyes. "Trixie is sure it's a great coincidence."

"Well, you really have only three options. Leave Twilight Sparkle alone, flee, and refuse to have anything to do with her ever... though that might not work. His power is already working on you, making you obsessed with revenge. He wants to fight you, to humiliate and hurt you for having dared to challenge his marefriends. He thinks you're a villain, and he wants a confrontation so he can punish you for being a villain."

"But Trixie is not a villain!"

"I know that, and you know that, but he doesn't, and that's all that matters. You may not be able to escape him; even if you choose to leave Twilight alone, if he wants you to come confront her so he can beat you in the name of protecting her, you will, and you'll think it was your own idea."

"Trixie can resist—"

"Trixie hasn't resisted yet." I snapped a mirror in front of her. "Take a good look at yourself. You're obsessed with getting revenge on a mare who saved your life, for saving your life, because the way she did it humiliated you... but that had nothing to do with her. She didn't make you brag about the ursa. She didn't bring the ursa. All she did was solve a problem you created, and for that you want to get revenge on her."

"I only want to prove that Trixie is the better unicorn!"

"By getting hold of an amulet of power that would amplify your abilities to alicorn level. My, my. In my day 'better' generally meant 'better without performance enhancers', but I suppose the concepts of fair play are old-fashioned now?"

She tore her eyes away from the mirror. "What is the third option?"

"Take the Amulet of Illusion. Also known as one of the Elements of Disharmony, the Element of Deception. The Changeling Queen used it to convince everypony that she was Princess Cadance despite her failure to even begin to stay in character. Another Changeling hive used it to hide themselves within walls so that even I couldn't detect them. It will make you better able to cast illusions, better able to see through anypony else's illusions – including Changelings – and better able to resist mind control. It won't make you more powerful than Twilight Sparkle, but it will make you smarter – because for all her intellect, right now she's under the control of a fairly stupid creature who won't let her be tactically smarter than he is. You'll have your mind intact and tremendous enhancement to your illusion spells. My understanding is that those are your specialty anyway?"

Trixie nodded. "It... does sound enticing. But in my experience, anything that sounds too good to be true probably is, and this seems entirely too much like something tailor-made for Trixie. If you were trying to trick me, this would be the sort of thing you'd come up with."

I snorted. "You're not that important, Trixie. It seems tailor-made for you because I hunted high and low for a pony that seemed tailor-made for it. My goal isn't to corrupt Trixie Lulamoon; my goal is to find a compatible Bearer for my Element of Disharmony. You just happen to fit the bill remarkably well."

"An Element of Disharmony sounds villainous. How can I know if it's you who's trying to trick me into being a villain?"

"You're already a villain." I snapped up a ghostly image of Anon. "Because he says so, and reality cares what he says. But you could be a pointless thug of a villain, out for revenge, destined to be beaten and humiliated... or you could be the kind of so-called villain who's secretly a hero. Anon's a greater villain than even I am, and a greater threat to Equestria. Fight him, with tools that give you some hope of surviving it with your mind intact, and you could just possibly rescue Twilight, and her friends, and the Princesses, from a creature that's mind-controlled them into loving him." I grinned at her. "I don't know of any way to prove that you're the better unicorn that would be more effective than to rescue Twilight, and her friends, and the rulers of the realm, from a threat Twilight was powerless to fight back against."

And now I had her. She smiled, no doubt imagining herself at the head of a parade in her honor, or getting a medal from the Princesses, or something. "That... would be an excellent way to demonstrate Trixie's superiority, yes. But... an Element of Disharmony? How can Trixie be a hero by using a tool plainly designed for villainy?"

"Oh, you ponies. Disharmony isn't evil. It's a necessary part of the balance of existence. Did you know, that if an army of ponies marches across a stone bridge in perfect lockstep, the harmony of their hooves landing in synchronization will destroy the bridge and send them all plummeting to their death? Armies on the march make use of disharmony to protect themselves from threats like that. Besides, Anon calls himself an Element of Harmony, so naturally you should be an Element of Disharmony to fight him."

"Trixie thought there were only six."

"There are only six. He made up a new one, and reality bent to accommodate him. That's what we're up against here, Trixie." I wrapped my arm around her withers again. This time she didn't try to shake me off. "Ponies think of Deception as something evil, and certainly it can be used that way – Chrysalis didn't intend anything good for ponykind when she used it to impersonate Princess Cadance. But it doesn't have to be. You use deception in your storytelling, to put on an exciting show, all the time. Deceiving a pony into thinking they're receiving a useful medicine for a disease that has no actual cure has been known to cure them, because their own bodies might heal the disease if they think they're getting an effective treatment. And then of course, there's the deception every stallion knows to engage in if his wife asks him if this dress makes her rump look huge." I chuckled.

"How would I use this? Trixie has never fought a creature who can alter reality before."

I shrugged. "I don't actually know. That's why I'm giving out Elements of Disharmony to talented ponies who can figure out what to do with them and run with it. I can't tell you what to do; I can't even know what you're planning, because Anon could force me to monologue about it. Watch out for that, by the way."

Trixie nodded. "A villainous monologue. Of course. But if I had this Element of Deception... would I be able to craft a villainous monologue that isn't true, that would lead this Anon into a trap or some such?"

"Absolutely. An excellent idea. I'm going to pretend you didn't tell it to me, of course, but excellent nonetheless." I let go of her and floated away. "So. Does this mean you accept?"

Trixie sighed. "It appears that Trixie has no better options. But I will not be your minion! The Great and Powerful Trixie is a freelancer and will not tolerate micromanagement!"

"Wonderful, because I won't tolerate being expected to micromanage. I'm still going to call you my minion, though, because it's funny."

She stomped a hoof. "It is not!"

"It is! Look at you! You're furious just because of a word!" I pinched her cheek. "You ponies are so adorable!"

"The Great and Powerful Trixie demands to be treated with respect!"

"Trixie, in case you haven't noticed, I'm the spirit of Chaos. Chaos doesn't respect anyone or anything unless they earn it. You want my respect, you know what to do."

"Very well then! You will soon see that Trixie is the most effective choice you could have made for an ally!"

I hadn't even been trying to use reverse psychology on her. I mostly managed to avoid continuing to laugh at her, now that she'd somehow psyched herself into wanting to prove herself to me. Instead I summoned my Element.

The Element of Arrogance is a diadem in a crown; Greed is an eye; Rage is a hoof or paw in the moment of attack. Deception is a mask, though normally it takes the form of a cameo, a pendant or a pair of earrings rather than a full-sized wearable mask. It's shaped like a typical pony eyemask, like you'd see in Neigh Orleans at Maredi Gras (I find it hilarious that Winter's End, the "holiday" of deprivation and fasting that used to immediately precede Winter Wrap Up, has been largely eliminated, and ponies barely remember it ever existed... but the festival of complete licentiousness and overindulgence that used to occur right before Winter's End started is still a thing ponies celebrate, though mostly only in Neigh Orleans. And Prance. Which doesn't even have Winter Wrap-Up anymore, but they still have Maredi Gras.) Most of it is made of bone – dragon bone, I believe, because dragon bone can store an enormous quantity of magic. The eyeholes and the edge of the mask are lined with gold, and right along the gold there are embedded crystals. I gave it to Trixie as a pendant on a braided golden wire. Disharmony makes it hard for chain links to stay together, but wire is solid, and the braiding may give it additional strength, a trait of Harmony, but it also makes it much blunter and less likely to cut the wearer's skin, and that's a function of Disharmony.

As she took it, and I bonded it to her, the gold transmuted to silver – still every bit as magically active, but associated more with the moon than the sun – and the transparent crystals embedded in the mask turned blue. "This is... attractive," Trixie admitted. "Trixie has seen pictures of the Alicorn Amulet. It is not nearly as pleasant to look at."

"Well, creativity and chaos have much in common, so of course it's only natural that my amulet is nicer looking than something made out of boring old dark magic." I preened. Not entirely literally, because I'd have to have bent my head pretty far down to get at my wings.

"This will allow Trixie more power for illusion spells?"

I nodded. "It'll also make your lies more convincing, make you seem more trustworthy in general, make it easier for you to pull off pretty much any con, and make it easier for you to spot lies and illusions."

"This is acceptable," Trixie said. "Can Trixie take on this Anon with this?"

"Maybe. I wouldn't go after him directly if I were you, but since it'll give you some protection from his mind-warping, you can try if you want. What you need to remember is that in Anon's playbill, you're the villain. If you want to survive your encounters with him, stage your 'villainy' to allow you a quick getaway."

"You might as well teach your grandmother to chew cheese as to try to teach Trixie the finer points of escape artistry," Trixie sneered. "I believe I will challenge Twilight Sparkle... and when Anon comes to defend his marefriend, I will make it a matter of honor. A hero will not interfere in a duel, not if the outcome won't harm anypony, and a stallion who does interfere to 'protect' his marefriend obviously believes that she will lose! Twilight will acknowledge my superiority, or Anon will stand down and let me duel her."

A grin crept across my face. "You really weren't supposed to tell me that, but I'll do my best to keep it under wraps, because that sounds hilarious. Make sure you get a recording for me, will you?"

So that was that. I have my Element of Deception in play. Go Team Chaos!

Ugh. The next one is the Element of Cruelty. I'm not looking forward to retrieving that. This is going to be sufficiently disgusting that I'm going to take a few days off before I head up north. Besides, I need to find out what exactly the story ended up being with the Crystal Empire. Not like I'm not pretty sure I already know.


Well, now that was an interesting event.

I wasn't actually expecting to do anything relevant. I was Twister, at the xenophile club. Yes, maybe it misses the point just a little bit to be impersonating a pony at a xenophile club, thus competing with all the other ponies for the non-ponies present. But I can't help it; I like being Twister. I have griffin and minotaur and zebra and ikaros forms that I take when I'm looking for nothing more than a quick quasi-anonymous encounter, but when I want to be social and interact with ponies as if I were one... Twister has a personality. Admittedly a personality a lot like my own, but that just makes him especially satisfying to be. I'd prefer to be myself, but if I can't be me, well, I have a history with Twister. And while I really do think it's cheating to consider zebras non-ponies... come on, they're equines, they can naturally breed with ponies without magic... there's a zebra lady there who's rather fond of Twister, or possibly rather fond of Twister's habit of spending a lot of bits, and oh does she ever know what she's doing, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. Zebras specialize in the magic of the natural world, and Amari's specialty seems to be the magic of equine bodies. (And yes, that is a zebra name. They don't all have names that start with Z.)

But I'm trying to keep this memoir, if not family-friendly, then at least relatively safe for working ponies (though honestly, who's reading my journal at work?), so enough about that. I was actually sitting at the bar, watching the other denizens of the club circulate, and considering whether I wanted to get up and buy someone a drink or sit here and wait to see if someone would buy me one, when someone I recognized entered the bar.

I might have mentioned being somewhat disorganized about writing this thing (you think?) This is not the first time that it's come up that I completely forgot to talk about Cheese Louise, but the last time I remembered that I hadn't done it yet, I forgot again. I'd blame Anon, but I'm perfectly capable of being scatterbrained on my own. You can't really expect the spirit of Chaos to be detail oriented, after all.

So. Sometime between my de-tailing and my tea party with Wiñaypaqori, I encountered an itinerant mare who reminded me a great deal of Pinkie – a party planner, with a goofy curly mane, who uses chaos magic and doesn't know it. It was the chaos magic that drew my attention; Pinkie's just background noise at this point, I've been observing her most of her life, but a new spike of chaos magic... well, you can see why that would interest me. I dropped in to observe her set up a gigantic party for a cuteceñera for an orphaned foal living with his grandmother, by pulling it out of a cart that was in no way large enough to contain the multiple bouncy castles, portable hedge maze, balloon cannon, foam ball shooters, and elaborate fireworks display, not to mention the various pastries, that turned out to be in it.

Her name was Cheese Louise, she had a cutie mark of a cheese sandwich reminiscent of an accordion, and while she was approachable and cheerful during the party, afterward she slipped into a mysterious, taciturn persona that was obviously modeled after the Colt Eastwood character in A Fistful of Bits and the other movies in that series. At the time, I was actively looking for evidence of mares who might possibly really be stallions, who'd been warped by Anon, because I was still trying to figure out if Anon had turned the stallions into mares or just sent them into nothingness. Under most circumstances a mare modeling herself after a male character wouldn't have really drawn my attention, but I was looking for it.

So I dropped down to have a conversation with Cheese Louise, in my Twister form. We sat outside under the moonlight in the middle of the San Palomino Desert and ate cheese sandwiches, which were apparently Louise's favored travel food. It was a bit awkward to try to bring up the issue of whether or not the mare you are talking to might possibly identify as a stallion in her own mind instead, so I talked about myself and my feelings that I wasn't really a pony. (Which, being that I am not really a pony, were absolutely true.) Encouraged by my tale, Cheese admitted to me that she'd been feeling for a few months as if she really shouldn't be a mare. She didn't understand it; her memories held no such questioning, and from what she knew of transgendered ponies they usually recognize their true gender before they get their cutie mark (hard to identify your destiny if you have no idea who you really are, I suppose.) But the feeling had been getting stronger. She'd adopted the Stallion with No Name's persona because she'd started feeling deeply uncomfortable with ponies seeing her body, or with wearing mare's clothes to cover it, so she went around in a masculine poncho most of the time.

After our conversation, I questioned several more mares who I found wearing stallion-style clothing. A few of them were just butch, or enjoyed the thrill of cross-dressing, but a good number of them had the same issue – they only felt comfortable in stallion's clothing, they'd recently started to feel as if they weren't really mares, yadda yadda. So I figured out from all this that Anon was slightly less monstrous than I'd feared, and had just changed the stallions into mares. I might even have appreciated the amusement factor of mareifying stallions if it weren't for the fact that it was coming from him, and that his motives seemed so very base and venal.

Anyhoo. So here I am in the club when Cheese Louise walks in, looking totally lost. Not like innocent and confused lost, like that mailmare with the misaligned eyes, but more of a determined lost – "I have no idea where I am, but by golly I'm going to keep marching forward until I figure it out" kind of expression. I got up and headed over to her. "Cheesy! I had no idea you swung this way!"

She turned red. "I'm looking for a client. I think. My Cheesy Sense told me that there was somepony important I had to meet somewhere in this bar, and usually that means somepony wants a big party. Um. I guess if they're in here they might not be a somepony. Somegriffin or something?"

"The correct term is someone when you don't know what species they are, and somegriff if you know they're a griffin," I said. "So you just wandered in here because you thought there might be a client?"

"Well, that's usually what it means. It could mean that somepony from Publisher's Stable wants to give me a huge check, but that's not usually how it works."

"What if someone wanted to give you a profound revelation that would change how you perceive the world, and yourself?"

"Uh... yeah, I suppose theoretically that could be it..."

I grinned. "Well, then, my Cheesy friend, I think you've come straight to the right place!" I put a foreleg up over his withers. "I suspect very strongly that I have something to show you that will blow your mind."

She looked deeply uncomfortable. "You're a decent guy, Twister, but I'm strictly a mare's mare, you know? Not that there's anything wrong with it the other way around, just not my cup of soda pop."

I laughed. "Oh, trust me, I have no designs on your virtue, not as long as you don't have any designs on mine. Well, actually, how would one go about making designs on virtue? And what if the pony in question hasn't got any? Because I'm fairly sure I lost the last of mine many years ago."

"Yeah, I gotta wonder about that. Are they making the designs with Magic Marker? Hoofpaint? What?"

I quite like this pony. She's essentially a less hyper Pinkie Pie who doesn't carry a weapon that can turn me to stone and hasn't been made stupid by Anon. "In any case, I'm not certain until we go look, but I'm fairly sure I have something to show you that will change the entire way you look at the world, and no, it's not the sort of thing that folks at this club are usually offering to show each other." My grin got bigger. "But first, where were you born?"

"Uh, here in Manehattan, but I don't see what that has to do with—"

"Come quickly, I'll show you!"

I led her off to one of the private rooms in the back. Cheese was getting increasingly nervous. "You know, I'm all for being friendly, but this might be a step too far, you know? I'm not sure how I feel about going into a room with a strange stallion at some kind of weird club for kinksters."

I sighed. "I'm not a rapist, Cheese. Trust me, I have no sexual intentions in this matter."

"Well, then why can't you just tell me what you have to show me?"

"Because you have to see it to believe it." I opened the door to the room. "Ladies first."

She flicked her ears in annoyance, but stepped through the door – and looked around herself, blinking. "What – where's the light?"

I switched it on. "Sorry, I should have realized there wouldn't be any lights on after hours in here."

Now she was even more confused. "What the – where are we?"

We were in a room full of filing cabinets. "The Department of Vital Records for Manehattan. When were you born?"

She gave me her birthdate. I made one attempt to find where that would be stored, and gave up. "Oh, I'm no good at organizing anything. Cheese, can you figure out where records for your birth date would be stored?"

"Why are we looking up my birthdate?"

"You'll see. My, you're impatient."

Hesitantly, she went through the files, until finally she found her own birthdate. "Okay... these are birth certificates. Are we looking up my birth certificate?"

"Maybe. What are your parents' names?"

She told me. I cast a spell to make a certificate containing those names light up, and when I found it, I withdrew it from the cabinet. "Take a look at this."

"Huh. A colt named Cheese Sandwich, born the same day I was. That's a pretty wild coincidence." Her eyes flickered back and forth as she read. "Born in the hospital I was born in! And... wait. These are my parents' names."

"Yes. Yes, they are." I grinned broadly at her. Or rather, at him, now that I'd confirmed my guess.

He stared at me in total confusion. "Is this some kind of joke? Because it's actually not all that funny."

"No joke. That's your birth certificate. You were born a stallion. Well, technically a colt."

"I don't understand. Are you saying someone changed me when I was born?"

"No, actually, I'm saying someone changed you a few months ago and altered your and everyone else's memories to make you think it had always been that way." An idea that was almost certainly idiotic had come to me, but since when has idiocy  ever stopped me? I stretched. "Now don't go panicking on me. You showed me yours – well, technically, I showed you yours – and now I'll show you mine." Cheese took a step backward, nervously, as I kept stretching, and stretching, and stretching, pulling my draconequus form out of my pony form by what looked like sheer muscle power. "Ta-daa! See, we were both right. You're really a stallion and I'm really not a pony."

"I kind of recognize you from somewhere," Cheese said, and then snapped his hoof, which previously I had only ever seen Pinkie Pie pull off. "Yeah, that's right! You were that statue in Canterlot Gardens, weren't you?"

"That was me," I said.

"I saw you on a class field trip, and then I got into a fight. Two idiot fillies in my class knocked a couple of my baby teeth out."

"Sorry about that." I wasn't sorry. Cheese's pain had been my gain; ten or fifteen years of foals being disharmonious to each other had given me the strength to break free, the first time. Or rather, the strength to break free within only a year of the Elements shifting as they were reassigned. Without Cheese and many foals like him punching each other's lights out, I might have been stuck in there for a few more years after the Elements changed hooves. "I'm pleased to see you're not running and screaming."

He shrugged. "What would be the point? It's kinda hard to imagine why you'd go to all the trouble to show me my birth certificate if you were just going to eat me."

"That's a very mature way to look at it. I'm proud of you."

"Did you do this to me?"

I scowled. "I take it back. You're terrible."

"Hey, just asking."

"Why would I be telling you about this if I was the one who'd done it?"

"Because a prank isn't funny if nopony knows about it?"

Well, I had to admit he had a point. "Yes, yes, but I didn't do this. I do know who did, though."

Cheese was still staring at his birth certificate. "Why?"

"Why do I know? Because I researched this."

"No, that's not... why would anypony do this? Why change stallions to mares? I – are any of my memories real? I remember being a filly. I remember playing with dolls, and wearing dresses... but I can't remember any of the details. I couldn't tell you what any of my dresses looked like."

"Because they weren't real. Unless you were in the habit of crossdressing, and I suspect you'd be able to remember some dresses if that were the case."

"So how do I know what is real? My cutie mark story – did that really happen? Did I really run away from home? Did my dad really threaten to cut off my allowance if I wouldn't go home and become a dentist, like him? Did my mom really send me care packages of cookies with bits hidden in the package so my dad wouldn't know she was giving me money?"

"I don't know." I shrugged. "I wasn't there for any of that. But false memories are notable for their lack of actual detail. Things you remember very vividly are probably true. Things that seem like you don't remember them at all, you just know what happened, are probably false."

"Why would somepony do this?" He shook his head, eyes wide, apparently afflicted with the existential angst of discovering that some creatures really are just bad. "All the soul-searching I've been doing, all of the feeling that everything is wrong, and the feeling that the feeling that everything is wrong is wrong because if everything is wrong then how did I just notice it now? When did this happen?"

"A few months ago. If you're familiar with the Changeling invasion of Canterlot... it happened right around then."

"Why? Who did it?"

"You heard about the human who was the big hero of the Changeling invasion? It was him."

"But why? What did I do to him?"

He was obviously quite distraught. "What would you say the ratio of mares to stallions is, nowadays?"

"Uh... that's not really something I'm an expert in, but... three, maybe four, to one?"

"It used to be about 60 percent to 40 percent. Maybe even 55 to 45. I'm no expert either. A slight imbalance in favor of mares, but nothing too serious. Then Anon came... and now the ratio is what it is now. Millions of stallions were turned into mares, their memories and the memories of everypony who knew them altered to accommodate the change, so nopony knew it had happened. But I'm resistant to Anon's power. I could tell." I wasn't going to say that the main source of my resistance ability had been the fact that I'd been a stone statue at the time.

"i just don't... why would anypony do this? Anyone?"

"Well, I don't read minds, but my guess is, it was because he wanted the world to be one where males, and particularly him, can easily have an entire harem of wives. The way it was before, herding was rare, and most marriages were opposite-sex and involved just two ponies."

"Wow. Mind. Blown." He shook his head. "How? And why? I mean, why would you change everything just so you can have a herd? Why not just change the minds of the ponies you want in the herd, if you've got that kind of power? It's nonsense, and not the fun, clowny kind."

"I don't know. That's my best guess. For all I know he's a misandrist who hates stallions. It's not that important why he did it. What's important is fighting back."

"Can you change me back? If you know who I was supposed to be, can you make me into him?"

I shook my head. "Pony sex change spells rely on harmony. They only work when the body and the soul are misaligned with each other, as in your case. So it's possible that a standard pony sex change spell could fix you... but I can sense the spell on you, now that I know for a fact that it's there, and it's very, very rigid. Harmony has a hard time working with such rigid structures. I, on the other hand, love to disrupt rigid structures... but changing your sex would be bringing you into alignment, which is Harmony, and my magic requires either Disharmony or Chaos. Changing one stallion back into who he ought to be is harmonious and does not cause a particularly large amount of chaos." While this is not 100% true – I have been known to pull off magical stunts that cause neither – it's very hard for me, and not reliable, and I wasn't going to put myself that far out for Cheese. Besides, I had a better idea.

His face fell. "Darn it. That sounded like it could have worked so well, too."

"But!  If you can find and recruit enough of you who want to be reverted – say, 200 stallions in the bodies of mares, or so... well, restoring a large number of you might cause quite a bit of chaos. And you travel all over and meet all kinds of ponies; you shouldn't have trouble finding a large number of your kind. Now, you could go ahead and try the standard sex change spell—"

"I can't," Cheese said. "I went to a doctor and asked about it, two weeks ago. He said there wasn't any such spell and only weirdos would want such a thing and wanting to be something that I'm not is disharmonious and means I'm sick in the head."

I slapped myself in the forehead. Of course Anon wouldn't have allowed society to undo his perfect mostly-mares paradise. I was reminded of the rapists at Something Different, of the cops' attitude about them, and the prejudices against homosexuality and xenophilia that operated only on stallions. He'd managed to introduce disgust with transgenderism into a world that hadn't had it before. The concept of the cutie mark and destiny had generally made ponies unusually accepting of the differences of others, as long as those others were ponies. That hadn't been true when the tribes had been in conflict with each other, but nowadays, a pegasus could choose to live on the ground and take care of animals and a unicorn could choose to be a weather worker, and as long as they had a good cutie mark story to explain it, few ponies had trouble with members of one race acting in manners stereotyped to another. I couldn't remember a time when ponies had been hostile to the notion of ponies born into the wrong gender, though the harmonious alignment spell that could transform the body to match had only been invented about 200 years ago. But the human world lacked cutie marks, and had spent many more centuries focused on the idea that you do what you are born to do; now that they'd opened up and decided that anyone could be anything, they were still having trouble extending the concept from "any job" to fundamental parts of identity. This was either Anon's belief, or the belief that he expected everyone to have regardless of what his own belief was, imposed on ponies.

"Well, fine," I said. "In that case, this strategy's your best chance. Round up 200 stallions or more who are stuck as mares, and get in contact with me." I handed him a business card, which had nothing on it but a picture of me. "Set this on fire or shred it up, and I'll know to come see you. I can perform the procedure if it's likely to cause chaos, even if it's going to increase the personal harmony of the targets. I can't restore your lost memories or the memories of your friends and family, though."

"Can the guy who did this undo it? Why hasn't the Princess done anything? Well, princesses."

"No one but me knows what he's responsible for. Including himself. And no, he can't undo it, though I'm hoping that if I can defeat him maybe it will undo itself."

"Well, good luck with that. In the meantime... can we get out of the Department of Vital Records? I really don't want to get caught here."

"There isn't even any security," I scoffed. "Who'd break in and steal birth certificates?" But I returned him to the club, because he was a potential ally. I had no Element of Disharmony to give him, and he wasn't well-suited for any of them anyway, but a guy spreading the information all over Equestria about the stallions being turned into mares was every bit as useful to me as the Elements were, if not moreso. Let it get back to Celestia and Luna what had happened, through a source that wasn't me, and maybe it might break Anon's hold over them, or at least open their eyes a bit.


So I've just checked up on how things are going with my minions. Trixie hasn't really gotten in gear yet; right now, she's primarily occupied in buying supplies and replacing her wagon. (The new one has an option for ski blades and is also waterproofed and can function as a boat. She's going all out.) The money she'd saved to buy the Alicorn Amulet when she eventually found it is going into her shopping spree, but she's reserving it for the stuff that's very specific to magic; mostly what she's doing is walking into places like Barnyard Bargains and P-Mart and convincing them that she has a line of credit with the store, then buying food and furniture and other basic supplies.

Blueblood has been going after Anon's stipend. All of the Elements of Harmony receive a stipend from the Crown, a payment for services rendered that's intended to function as a replacement for the money they're losing by doing their Elements thing instead of their jobs. Anon does not in fact have a job, which means that a stipend based on replacing his lost wages ought to be $0. Of course, Twilight filled it out for him with a non-zero number, so Blueblood has gotten an auditor who isn't too thrilled with xenophilia in general, even in mares, to take a good hard look at the paperwork. Bluey expects that Anon's stipend will be revoked, retroactively, which means he'll be sent a big fat bill and everything he bought on letter of marque – the form of credit those who are receiving a government stipend can use where they can bill goods against future stipend – will be owed, so that's a lot of other big fat bills he'll get. I'm really appreciating having brought Blueblood onto the non-team (they're Elements of Disharmony, they can't work together. Of course they're not a team.) I would never have thought of that! Of course eventually it will get back to Celestia, who will override it, but if the auditor sends a sternly worded letter to Twilight regarding the fraud she committed by filling out Anon's form as if he had a job when he doesn't, Twilight will probably panic and refuse to contact Celestia about the problem out of fear that Celestia will throw her in jail. I suggested this to Blueblood, since he has less insight into the instability of Twilight Sparkle's psyche than I do, and he thought it was a good idea.

Gilda, as I mentioned earlier, was involved in a nice direct confrontation with the Elements, which takes some of the pressure off me. Of course Applejack got rescued, but she had to wait, because Rainbow Dash showed up, found her, and then got scared that she wouldn't be able to fly Applejack down safely, so she had to wait for Anon to get back. She didn't even think to go get Twilight; oh, no, it had to be Anon. (And, mind you, Anon went alone to rescue Rarity, so it probably took him a lot longer than it should have.) Gilda taunted Dash for this, a lot, and ended up getting her jaw broken by a punch she didn't dodge in time, but according to her it was worth it. She did have to use one of the teleport tokens I gave her – she insisted she'd never need them, that she was too fast and they couldn't possibly get the drop on her, but I insisted she carry the teleport tokens anyway, and it turns out I was right, as I usually am. Anon had his sword, of course, and he went for her. Part of me thinks I should be pleased at the thought of Gilda getting skewered by Anon in front of Rainbow Dash, because I'm fairly sure that if anything could turn Rainbow against Anon, that would be it. But the truth is... I like Gilda. Sure, she's annoying as all get-out, but being that I am disharmony, I get a perverse pleasure out of being around someone who annoys me. I like arguments, I like challenges, I like feeling perfectly righteous about pulling pranks because the other one totally deserves it. And while I've had an entourage before, in my days of unruling Equestria, the fact that Gilda has no respect for the fact that I am vastly more powerful than she is actually feels good. I don't like being kowtowed to. It doesn't feel as if it fits. Chaos should be about smashing hierarchies. All right, maybe I'd like a little more respect than I'm getting, but that's all right. Besides, she eats my food. Who else do I have to share meat with? Ponies today are strictly vegetarian.

You know what, I'm stalling again. I really don't want to have to go get the Element of Cruelty. I mean, maybe I could do without it? I've got three perfectly good minions and a spare Element to hand out to someone greedy... but no. I think I'm going to need at least six of them in play, if not all seven, because Anon's story won't make sense to him if there aren't at least six, and if Anon's story doesn't make sense then he starts mind-controlling others into making it make sense. I don't want to be mind-controlled into going and getting my other Elements, particularly since I still have no idea where Selfishness is. So I guess I have no choice.

I don't really expect any trouble on this trip, per se, but I might need to bathe my head in a bucket of brain bleach after I get back.