• Member Since 11th Oct, 2013
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alarajrogers


Okay, I admit it, I'm probably not your mom. But odds are I'm old enough to be. Now with Patreon account (under alarajrogers) and short stories on Amazon (under Alara Rogers).

Sequels1

Comments ( 21 )

*Ahem*:

"Hey, Elements of Halfmony! The Prime Material Plane is calling, they want their trickster spirit back! Also, they want you to know that they're coming. For. You!

Have fun getting an actual friendship beam to the face, you justice lord rejects!"

Wow. Very well done. Will there be another follow up? Will we find out if the letter got to the other Spike?

Poor Discord ;~;

And damn it, the letter didn't make it ~sobs~

Forever here, waiting for the next chapter. - Sapphire

3619887
The letter didn't make it to this Spike's Celestia. No green fire when he sent his own letter to her.

The letter probably ended up with the princess Celestia of Discord's home dimension.

3619916

It actually went to the other Spike. Discord was saving up his magic to be able to do that. He had no intention of sending it to this Celestia; he believes she's in on this (and if you read Twilight Sparkle's Report on the Entropic Gradient, you'll see he's probably right). But he wouldn't be able to use this Spike to send it to his Celestia without spending more magic than he has; getting it to go between cognates was easier.

If you notice, every time it's mentioned that the document is going to Celestia, it's Spike saying so. All Discord ever says is that something is wrong with the Element Bearers and something ought to be done. He *never* acknowledges or agrees that the document is going to Celestia. So he never actually lies... but he omits the truth, which is why he ends up throwing up. Twilight knows that unless Discord's actively being forced to eat something disgusting, the main reason he becomes nauseous is that the honesty spell is trying to force him to divulge more information and he's holding it back. That's why she accuses him of lying.

3620126 Ohhh

...You're such a greatly detailed author. I respect you for that.

The next one is going to be fun hopefully.:twilightsmile:

nooooooo
poor discord
that was soooo brutal oooh my goodness
cant wait for the next part

If this story doesn't eventually have a happy ending I'm going to cry.
Tthis is the most terrifyingly dark thing I've read in a long time. It's too good. Well-written dark stories are the most painful. Yet I must continue.

Part of me sorta wonders if the spell can't be removed specifically because of Twilight's little Order tiara being bonded to her element.

The thing is, Harmony isn't about order, it's about balance.

Order is about the status quo, things stay the same, day in, day out, over and over as they slowly, but surely, stagnate.

Chaos is about change, but unrestrained, just constantly shifting anarchy until things tear themselves apart.

But Harmony, Balance, is about just that. It's about happy mediums. it's about how relationships change in reaction to how folks can change, as they constantly are with every experience.

The elements exemplified that, a balance between order and change that is needed for someone to function properly, Discords power tipped that scale, changing the girls, but Twilight's Tiara slammed the order side of the scales to the ground and nailed it down, locking the girls in their current 'status quo', which is their shifted selves. Yes, the elements try and fix things, like Fluttershy shifting more to her normal self, but with the Tiara of Order saying "No, nothing changes, everything is fine as it is" like a petulant fool with their head in the sand, the balance can't be reattained...

Unless something truly Chaotic managed to balance out the Tiara.

But, that's all just a thought of mine...

3620126
Sorry, I don't get that from this. Oh, sure, Celestia knows there's something wrong with the Element Bearers, and is compromising with allowing an evil for the sake of preventing a greater evil, but as Twilight says, Celestia isn't in top form any more. That _Twilight_, She Who Worships the Sun, says this so casually in a letter, indicates to me that the truth is far worse - that Celestia is barely holding it together. If that's the case, then when Twilight mentions that the there are negative aspects to the Element Bearers, but neglects to mention how they are catered for, Celestia could quite easily overlook it, as it's _Twilight_, and she's the only pony alive Celestia can trust.
So no, Celestia isn't quite the benevolent or nigh-omnipotent ruler she is in the show, but she is still being deceived as to the exact level of messed-up-ness that she's allowing into her domain.

3785443

I honestly didn't think about that. You could be right. On the other hand, Alternate Celestia may truly not care, at least in regards to Discord. The other one's actions led to her having to kill Nightmare Moon. I can see her turning a blind eye to what Twilight has been allowing Fluttershy and Pinkie Pie to get away with in general because she needs her Elements and she just doesn't want to know... but she may well be aware that Twilight is torturing Discord and allowing Fluttershy and Applejack to do so as well, and not care, because her sister is dead and it is Discord's fault. (She knows it wasn't literally this Discord, but the one who did do it was murdered by Spike and she has no reason to believe this one isn't equally as bad.)

I agree, though, that she is probably totally hands-off at this point, and that Twilight has a really disproportionate influence on the government right now.

3732002

If that were the case that would be incredibly ironic. :-) For a year, Twilight couldn't reverse the spell Discord put on the Elements, and Discord was running around the whole time with impunity, causing rather more malevolent chaos than we've seen this one do. It may be that Discord was reinforcing the spell frequently, that without that reinforcement it would have worn off naturally. So then when Twilight solved the problem of being able to harmonize with the other elements by embracing Magic's opposite, which is also Discord's enemy... she contained Discord, but would have trapped herself and her friends in the new state, whereas if she'd found a different way to stop Discord (such as the one she ended up using on this version, which she didn't come up with while the native Discord was still running around and she herself wasn't yet corrupted), she might have been able to undo the spell and restore her friends to themselves.

Order Twilight is the tragic villain of the series, the counterpart to Discord as the protagonist/hero, both of whom essentially screw themselves over in the same way, by massive hubris. Alternate Twilight thought she could sell her soul and get a good result, but you can't get a good result by selling your soul because by definition once you have sold your soul you can no longer do good. Admittedly she was desperate. Discord messes with the wrong universe and ends up in Hell because he thought he was basically invulnerable; Twilight became the monstrous Order Twilight because she thought she was smart enough and strong enough to handle it. Everyone else from the evil universe, Celestia, the other Elements, they are collateral damage. They aren't the way they are because of their own free choices, it's what others did to them.

That actually works. Thematically I have a serious problem with almost any effect of Chaos magic being permanent; I think Discord has to go way out of his way to make permanent changes. He can do it but usually only by using his magic to influence some other force (for example, Luna is permanently dead because he turned her back into Nightmare Moon and forced Celestia to have to kill her). So if alternate Discord was frequently reinforcing the spell that made the Elements of Harmony into the Elements of Opposition, and thus Twilight's actions to stop him are actually what doomed her and her friends... that would very much fit the theme here.

The document burnt in a flash of green flame. Bright green flame. "That's weird."

He looked down at Discord, intending to ask if the draconequus knew anything about the odd color change[...].

Colour change? Weird?
vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/0/0a/Spike_sending_letter_S1E01.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/640?cb=20120904135918
I think that's pretty normal.

6898285
Yeah, that was a mistake on my part to choose a different shade of green. Spike's flame is usually green or blue, but this was a really intense green, more like the color of a forest than the usual spring bud color of Spike's flame.

I might go back at some point to make the color change more apparent, but the idea was that it was an off-shade of his usual color because that's what chaos magic tends to do, a la the discorded ponies getting grayer, or, in Not the Hero, ponies who are pushed toward emphasizing the positive parts of their personality get brighter but oversaturated, losing subtle shades. (This is hard to convey because the cartoon MLP does not have subtle shades, and it all falls into my headcanon that what they "really" look like is vivid and bright but not nearly as unnaturally even-chromatic as they are in the cartoon.)

So I'm doddering through the Elements of Opposition stories, and have to ask, did EoO Discord to anything to EoO Celestia? Is his rampage ever expanded on?

Sure, I can see her not caring after he reverted Luna to Nightmare Moon, but was that all?

7933294
Directly, no, but by transforming Luna into Nightmare Moon, he made Celestia have to kill her.

3791208
Devils advocate time!

If twilight has a reasonable chance of deriving immortality tech from discord it would be wrong to rescue discord.

This does not of course excuse the unnecessary horrific conditions unrelated to deriving immortality tech of course.

9580493
Skipping the points I now see were better covered previously in the comments...

You'd think. But the thing is, you can do a lot of startling things in science by yourself, and can manage to do things that heavily influence what other researchers are doing, but it seems like the idea that you can make an omelet just by enough willingness to destroy eggs never works out. You just end up with a lot of egg everywhere but in the pan. That's the major argument for ethics in the fields of science and medicine. Not the comparative morality of cost and reward, but that for some reason the historical record bears out the idea that the less researchers bother to follow the concept of professional ethics, the less useful their results end up being. I don't have an explanation, but that's the direction the historical record goes, and it provides a good reason to doubt if Twilight's doing anything better than mental masturbation. (Which she's prone to. Discord rambles to avoid telling unpleasant truths; Twilight studies to avoid hearing or thinking about them.)

Although if not better she's trying for more if she's attempting to filter Chaos magic into Harmony. That said, doing this would be a very very bad thing for ponykind in the long term if she succeeded (which may not be possible, but it's not like intelligent people in our universe haven't convinced themselves their perpetual motion engines check out mathematically), and the very fact that she's trying heavily implies her definition of "non-alicorn immortality" no longer matches what you're thinking of in any but the grossest details.

9800316
True. An Immortality derived from discord might not be a good type of immortality, and twilight is not in the mental state to decide right here.

And yes I don’t think her research is actually going to get anywhere, this sort of needless torcher isn’t something a effective researcher would normally do.

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