In which I am embarrassed to admit I pretty much don't succeed at anything
I'm quite proud of myself! I've spent about half of today creating a spell to block Luna from a pony's mind. Of course I can block her for myself -- I have quite a bit more raw power than she does -- and I could easily enough cast a chaos field around any given pony to make Luna's spell fall apart as she tries to enter their dreamscape. One thing chaos magic is exceptionally good at is disrupting harmonic magic. Oh, you should have seen what those vines I was breeding a millennium ago could do to any unicorn, even one who wasn't actively trying to cast!... shame about those, they were supposed to sprout after I planted their seeds, but that was right before I was turned to stone the first time, and I suppose they needed something I wasn't around to give. Ah, well, c'est la guerre.
The problem is that if I cast a chaos field around a pony, Luna's going to know it, and she's going to know that pony is important to my plans. Also, an alicorn can superconcentrate harmonic magic to the point where if they try really hard they can break any spell of mine that I'm not actively concentrating on myself. So I'd tip Luna off that these ponies are useful to me, which is exactly why I don't want her spelunking in their dreams, and in the end I wouldn't be able to keep her out of their heads anyway. Once I finish collecting my Elements of Disharmony, or some of them anyway, I'm going to be handing them out, and once I do that I want the ponies who have them to be immune to Woona The Dream Spy.
Creating actual spells is not what chaos magic is particularly good at. Harmonic spells are easy, if you do that sort of thing, which I don't because boring. There are little routines you make a spell perform, orders you give it if you will, and if you link them together just right you get a very, very predictable spell that will do the same thing every time you cast it, unless you're Twilight Sparkle and much too powerful for your own good. (Someday Sparky's going to figure out she's a chaos caster, that she's using pure willpower to force raw magic to do her bidding and, spoiler alert, raw magic is chaos magic. Entirely the wrong way to go about it. If she learned some chaos theory she'd be dangerous, but fortunately for me she has entirely the wrong mindset to be able to learn to manipulate chaos. On the other hand... just the fact that she can make raw magic do her bidding with willpower is impressive as it is. The only ponies I've ever seen pull that stunt were Starswirl, and Luna when she shouldn't have been able to do classical magic at all. But I digress!)
Chaos magic does not work the same way. As my little digression above should suggest, raw, uncontrolled magic is chaos magic, and vice versa. Change, disorder, transformation of information, is the engine that generates magic in our world, so stirring up disorder increases the available free magic in the local mana pool. This actually makes more magic available to everyone, not just me, but since I can actually detect ebbs and flows in the thaumosphere that ponies can't, I become aware it's there a lot sooner than unicorns do. And I can use it directly. Users of harmony magic, aka every sane unicorn ever, can't.
Think of it this way. Raw magic is waiting to do what you tell it to. But raw magic is, mmm, hyper. Raw magic is full of energy and it wants to do things with that energy. It wants to flow through you and make cacti into giant marshmallows and turn bananas into spiders and make water rain up. It comes from change and transformation, and that is what it wants to do. The act of casting a harmonic spell is the imposition of rules from the superstructure of Order, the metamagical rules that govern what you can and can't do with magic, to strip raw magic of its free will and make it do what you want, at which point, generally, it does exactly what you told it to do. Which is not necessarily what you wanted it to do, but then, that's why unicorns who experiment with creating and testing spells usually have a short life span if they don't get really good at it really fast.
(There is no such thing as Order magic, by the way. Magic is chaos. Ordering chaos is harmony, not order. Order supplied the rules that magic works by; it is not in itself a form of magic.)
I don't think this is very fair to magic! The poor thaumic particles, they just want to play and have fun and reproduce by causing disorder and change to make more thaumic particles, and stuffy stick-in-the-mud unicorns strip them of their ability to do what they want to do and force them to do what the unicorns decided, and I consider this a travesty! Won't anyone think of the poor thaumic particles?
Chaos magic, by contrast, is not about telling magic what to do. It's about persuading magic to do what you want. Convince magic that what you want would be fun, and it will happily cooperate... losslessly. See, adding the structure of rules to harmonic magic weakens the magic. You're burning up some of it in creating the structure that the rest of it will follow. The more precise your magical operation, the less power you have (and vice versa... this is why Twilight Sparkle, the world's most powerful unicorn, cannot match her friend Rarity for precision and dexterity.) But talking magic into doing what you want it to do? That consumes nothing. All the magic you were drawing on is available for creating the effect; none of it goes into shaping the magic.
Magic is my friend. It trusts me. It knows I'll create chaos, which will make more magic. Magic knows I won't force it to do things that are no fun. Twilight Sparkle may be the Element of Magic, but that's an element of Harmony. I am Chaos, and whatever sappy things Twilight might have to say about friendship... Chaos is magic. So magic does pretty much anything I want it to without my having to force it.
Thus, most of my spells are very spontaneous. Half the time I don't even know exactly what they'll do before they go off. I summon "pie"! Will it be cream pie? Cherry pie? Chicken pot pie? Snozzberry? Papier mache? Mud pie? Pinkie Pie? The circumference of a circle divided by its diameter? (Usually it's not that one. Chaos hates math, unless the math is really complicated or interesting.) But when I have to create a spell that produces a consistent effect when I'm not around to guide it... that takes work, because frankly, magic is brainless. Magic is such a hyperactive ferret it makes Pinkie and I look like stolid college professors. This is why most creatures have to use harmonic magic to get anything resembling consistent effects; magic is stupid and you have to tell it what to do.
So it was a real challenge for me. I had to create a spell that would use chaos magic in a consistent way when I'm not around to tell it what to do, and it would have to perform a task much more complex than "mess up harmonic spells".
What I did was to create a spell that generates dreams. Normally it leaves dreams alone entirely; dreams are chaotic, and the chaos of dreams feeds the spell, strengthening it. When it senses dreamwalking magic -- anyone's, it doesn't have to be Luna's -- it sends a compulsion to the dreaming mind to relive happy childhood memories. I picked happy childhood memories because every creature that dreams has some (and if their childhood was endless misery, most likely my spell will just make them make up some happy things to dream about... it's a dream, after all, it doesn't have to have actually happened). Luna won't interfere with a happy dream, and a dream about my minion's childhood will necessarily take place before they became my minion and therefore include no telltale imagery of talking statues or cotton candy or my handsome face. And because the effect will produce different dreams for every pony I cast it on, every time it goes into effect, it is sufficiently chaotic that it falls within the purview of what I can use my powers for, which allows me to get away with adding just enough structure to it that it becomes a repeatable spell with consistent results that work when I'm not focused on it.
I realize I am damaging my villain cred by plotting to cast spells on my minions that give them happy dreams of idyllic foalhood. I know, I know, I'm supposed to be cackling "bwahaha" and giving them horrifying dreams that rend their souls and shatter their minds. Boring! Also stupid. If I select ponies because they're useful to me, odds are, driving them insane will make them less useful! Otherwise wouldn't I have picked insane ponies to begin with? Besides if I'm going to shatter somepony's mind and drive them into gibbering insanity... I want to do it when they're awake. And I'd do it to my enemies, not my allies.
See, unlike other villains, I don't take minions for granted. Most of the time, I work alone. I also really, really enjoy disharmony, which makes it close to impossible for anyone to work together. And I put a lot of value on freedom from nonsensical rules. So I don't treat minions like slaves, or servants who are honor-bound to carry out my whims; I treat them like contractors. They'll work for me as long as I'm paying them and they haven't gotten a better offer, therefore, I need to keep their working conditions fairly tolerable. Also I haven't figured out how to make anyone slavishly subservient and loyal to me without also making them fall in love with me, and if there's one thing infinitely worse than a disrespectful, wiseassed minion, it's a clingy, emotionally needy minion. (I like to think this is because I am so anti-authoritarian that I simply can't comprehend the mindset of slavishly serving anyone unless you're madly in love with them, not that I'm incompetent or something.) Other villains can growl "You have disappointed me for the last time" and kill their minions for a minor screw-up; I just tell them that they'd better get their plot in gear to fix their mistake or no Hearth's Warming bonus for them! And yet I still have far fewer minions than pretty much any other villain ever. Go figure. I guess minions don't like nice villains like me; they prefer to be pushed around by flankhole villains who mistreat them.
Anyway. At the moment I don't have any minions; I still need to go collect the Elements of Rage and Greed. But first, I'm going to tell you the rest of the story of my interviews with the Elements of Harmony.
When I dropped in on Pinkie, she was singing some sort of inane song about baking cupcakes, so I joined in with her.
As she was singing, "Cinnamon/vanilla too/Add them to our treat/A nutmeg pinch, a dash of salt/Soon they'll be ready to eat!" I chimed in "Cutie marks/and wingies too/Add them to our treat/A griffin pinch, a dash of Dash/Soon you'll be ready to eat!"
Pinkie turned and glared at me. "Do you mind? Those lyrics are really really gross and will ruin our Y7 rating!" (No, I have no idea what she meant by that. The ways of Pinkie can be mysterious even to me.) Then she did a comic doubletake. "DISCORD?!"
"No, no, no, discord would be if I'd been trying to sing a completely different song," I said. "For instance, you sing your song about cupcakes, and I sing 'A peanut sat on the railroad track, his heart was all a-flutter/Round the bend came the Number 10/Toot toot, peanut butter!'"
"Mmm, peanut butter," Pinkie said dreamily. "Hey, I could add some peanut butter to the cupcakes!" She went rummaging around in the pantry to dig up a jar of peanut butter, piped some into six of the cupcake centers, and only then swung back around to face me. "What are you doing here, you big meany pants?"
"Now what did I do to deserve that?" I asked her. "I come to visit, I sing with you, I even give you ideas for your cupcakes! And yet suddenly I'm a 'big meany pants!' Where's the friendship? The harmony?"
"You, mister, are not anypony's friend!" She poked her hoof in my face. "You'd better get out of here before I call Anon to turn you into a pincushion again!"
"Oh, Pinkie, you wound me," I said. "If only you and I could have seen eye to eye..." I snapped my eyeballs out and had them hover directly in front of Pinkie's, touching them. To Pinkie's credit, she continued to glare into my now much more closely proximate eyeballs. I pulled them back to my head with a rubberband snap. "I would have made you my Queen of Chaos!" I said, slithering around her.
"I don't want to be a queen of chaos, you big meanie!"
"Ah, but think of it, Pinkie. Chocolate rain, every day!"
"You'd just forget the whipped cream, like you did every single time!" Pinkie shrilled in my ear.
"Not now that you've reminded me!" I made a gigantic glass, twice as tall as Pinkie herself, appear in front of us, with a cotton candy cloud raining chocolate milk into it and a giant swizzle straw bent down so Pinkie could reach it, with large dollops of whipped cream floating on top. "But that's not all. Imagine flowers that turn into cupcakes!" I handed her one. It was a pink tulip that opened to reveal a pink-frosted cupcake inside. "Playgrounds made of peppermint!" With a bit of space-bending I made a full, adult-pony-sized foals' playground appear, where the supports for the swings and the slide were peppermint sticks and the chains on the swings were licorice. "Gingerbread houses that are edible!" We were now standing outside of Sugarcube Corner. I broke off a piece of it, took a bite and handed her the rest. "Want some?"
She took the gingerbread and munched it. "Mm, not bad, but I think it needs more molasses," she said. "And anyway you can't eat Sugarcube Corner! I work here!"
"But you'd have no need to work here if you joined me," I said. "Everypony in Ponyville would have all the sweets they could imagine wanting, for free! And you wouldn't have to do any of the work--"
"But I love baking!"
"--unless you wanted to! I could make you into an army of Pinkie Pies, able to bake up a thousand cupcakes in a night!"
"That does sound like a good idea..." Pinkie murmured, and then frowned. "Oh, wait, no, Anon told me about that. No, that's not a good idea!"
"Oh, you're so hard to please. What do you want, Pinkie? Anything you can dream of, and you could have it."
"I want you to go away, Mr. Meanie!" She poked me in my nose again.
I sighed theatrically. "But why, Pinkie? How can you break my heart like this?" I took my heart out of my chest to display its brittle and multi-sectioned condition to Pinkie before putting it back.
"Because my heart belongs to Anon, silly billy!"
Well, at least I had graduated from "big meanie" to "silly billy." "Why?" I asked plaintively. "How did he win your heart?"
"Because he's fun!"
"I'm fun," I pointed out.
"And he's nice," Pinkie said pointedly. "And goofy! And silly! And kinda wacky! And he has a lot of energy, and he gets my jokes!"
"I get your jokes..."
"And he's friendly, and he likes to make ponies laugh, like me, and he likes to play funny pranks, and one time! One time he got this rainbow taffy --" She pointed to a jar of paper-wrapped taffies on the counter -- "all in Dashie's hair, and we had to eat it to get it out of her hair!" Pinkie's expression went dreamy again. "Dashie hair... and taffy... mmm..."
"But Pinkie, he sounds exactly like me! How can you spurn me and savor him, when all the things you love about him are things I have as well?"
"Because he's nice! And you're not!"
I coiled around her again. "I think we've gotten off on the wrong footing, my dear," I said. "I can be quite nice. Unfortunately, when we met... I was trying to keep you six from wielding the Elements against me, and I'm sorry to say that meant I had to attack you. But I truly regretted doing that to you, Pinkie. Laughter has always been special to me."
"Not falling for it," Pinkie growled. "You're just a big meanie."
Back to this? The repetition was bothering me; I had had dealings with Pinkie before, and she'd been both funnier and less mindlessly repetitive. This was Anon's doing. Anon, who she loved for being funny. From my interactions with him I couldn't actually imagine him being humorous in the slightest, except for unintentionally.
"I mean it!" I said. "You were the only pony who appreciated any part of my chaos, and I had to destroy that to try to protect myself from the Elements. Believe me, I regret that very deeply. But I meant no harm to anyone else. I gave them chocolate milk rain and fields of popcorn!"
"You made those little bunny rabbits into mutants!"
"If you'd ever been as small as a bunny rabbit, you'd appreciate getting to be taller than most of your predators for once."
"And the dancing buffalo?"
"Oh, buffalo. Such Noble Warriors, such humorless archetypes of macho bravery. Don't you know I can't put anything into anyone if it's not there to begin with? Deep within the hearts of some buffalo, I sensed a longing for grace and beauty. Am I wrong to bring it out and let them experience their heartfelt dream, just because society will judge them harshly? What's wrong with being a buffalo ballerina, if that's what the buffalo secretly desires?"
Pinkie looked torn. I thought to myself that I might actually be getting somewhere with her. Then she scowled. "But you made me a mad meanie pants! I'm not really secretly angry at everypony! So you did put something in me that wasn't there!"
"Oh, Pinkie. You mean to tell me you've never had an angry thought? Never been resentful that your friends don't take you seriously, that they're too busy laughing at your antics to see the true you inside?"
"I'M NOT LISTENING TO YOU! LA LA LA LA!"
"You've never had the slightest resentment that they don't understand you? That they treat you as some sort of freak?"
She pulled out cymbals from her mane and started clanging them. But two could play at that game. I snapped up a pair of black anti-cymbals and clanged them in time with hers. The anti-cymbals produced a sonic wave form designed to be precisely the opposite of Pinkie's cymbals, thus canceling out the sound entirely. A bit more heavily ordered than I like my tricks to be, but it works on a principle of pure disharmony, so it's good enough.
However, it's really unpleasant to listen to if it's not canceling another sound out. On the last cymbal crash, Pinkie faked me out, and at the last moment did not clang her cymbals. I winced as the sound of a cymbal's exact opposite rang out through the air. She smirked at me as if she'd just won something. "You're not gonna get me this time, Discord. I know better than to listen to you!"
"Yes, but if you'd--"
"LAAAAAAAAAAA!"
Oh, the lungs on that mare. She meant it, too. She had decided she wasn't going to listen to me, and she was going to make silly noises to enforce it. For a moment I thought of taking her mouth... but what good would that do me? I was here to get her to tell me about Anon, not really to convince her that she would be better off leaving him and joining me in creating chaos... right?
Oh digitize me and put me in an array. I realized I had lost track of my true mission... because I was angry that he'd taken Pinkie. Not that she, personally, had ever been mine... but while I'll let Harmony's claim to Magic stand on the grounds that it's harmonic magic that the Element wields, Laughter should never have been Harmony's. It's mine. Laughter depends on chaos. And Pinkie was one of the rare ponies who was actually a chaos wielder. If Pinkie had to be my enemy, she should at least have been an enemy who could sympathize with me and who fought me for her friends' sake, not out of personal hatred. She should have been the Talia al Ghul to my Batman, the Rogue to my Magneto. (It suddenly occurs to me that you ponies have no idea what I'm talking about. Why do your comics have so very few examples of heroes and villains separated only by the ties of friendship or family, and loyalty?) I'd been trying to seduce Pinkie -- not sexually, though I certainly wouldn't throw her out of bed for eating cupcakes, but I'd sincerely been trying to convince her to come over to the chaos side of the Force. And as long as Anon was around, that was simply not possible.
I sighed. I could amplify Pinkie's desire for fun and laughter, but she was so resistant to me right now, she was halfway to discording herself into a state of wholly unwarranted rage, simply because I was the one trying to coax her to embrace her fun-loving side and her sense of compassion and forgiveness. Perhaps I could take advantage of that, lean on her harder to make her turn herself into a ball of oversensitivity and rage and then let her go take it out on her friends, or Anon... but I hadn't the heart for it. What I'd said to her hadn't been a lie -- I had regretted destroying Laughter. And while the whole Queen of Chaos thing had been a joke intended to open her up to telling me about Anon... it hadn't been without a grain of truth to it, either.
But right now she wasn't funny and she wasn't fun. She was just annoying, and it was his fault.
Her mind wasn't open to me, so I brute-forced my way in to erase the last ten minutes or so of her memories. I hadn't gotten anything I wanted from this encounter.
I suppose I need to tell you all about my dealings with Fluttershy, embarrassing as the story is. Who knows what information might turn out to be critical in defeating Anon, if I fail?
I always underestimate that little yellow pony. I wish I could chalk that up to Anon making me stupid, but I'm fairly certain I was more or less in my right mind when I went to her. I thought that getting the information I was looking for out of her would be easy, and that breaking her emotionally would also be easy. I wasn't expecting to turn her jealous, like I did Rarity; no, my intention for Fluttershy was to make her feel unworthy of Anon, and push her into turning him away out of a feeling that she doesn't deserve him. Failing that, if I could rile up some feelings of jealousy or anger, I was certain I could tie those in to Anon's actual, demonstrated behavior, which let us not forget had involved attempting to kill me with his sword (and cutting off my tail, but that hadn't happened yet), and convince her that he was cruel and violent and mean to animals (I am, technically, quite a few animals.)
This is... not how it worked out.
The first time I encountered Fluttershy in person... well, the very first time, I was actually behind a stained glass window, so I'm not even sure that counts as "in person". I was free, but offset dimensionally -- I was too weak to feel confident of taking on Celestia at her full power right then. I needed to wait for the chaos I'd started to snowball. And little Fluttershy had flinched away from my image, without even knowing that I was really behind it. Possibly this is part of why I underestimated her... the first time.
The second time, in the maze, she shocked me (and frustrated me like you can't believe) when she actually resisted me. Hard as I tried, I couldn't persuade her to open the door to my corruption. So I had to kick it in, so to speak, and unbalance her by force.
The next time I had one-on-one time with her, in the afore-discussed second go-round in the maze, she tried to use her Stare on me, and demanded that I release her friends. I pretended to be cowed by her, pleading with her not to use her disapproving eyeballs, before breaking down in hysterical laughter and telling her I just couldn't take how funny she was. And when I saw her face fall, when I sensed the disharmonious energies of disappointment, fear and rage sweep over her, I struck, using that moment of weakness to force the door open again and turn her cruel.
This time, I'd decided, I wouldn't cheat. I wouldn't use brute force, I wouldn't even try making her cruel -- it wasn't my goal, after all. If I could get her to open a door, I would amplify her, so she'd perceive Anon's behavior toward me as cruel, or I'd turn up her natural negative feelings. Making a pony's dark side, the negative impulses they fight all the time, come to the foreground was actually easier than completely inverting them, just not as much fun.
She was outdoors, feeding an incredible assortment of unruly and unpleasant-smelling small animals, when I dropped in on her and gave her pets wings, and a compulsion to fly. It was hilarious watching them flit around incompetently (I didn't magically grant them knowledge of how to fly, just the overwhelming desire to attempt it), while Fluttershy, only slightly more competently, flew around eeping and whimpering and pleading with them to slow down and let her catch them and oh no you're going to hurt yourself and so on and so forth.
Eventually she managed to catch them all, panting, and had personally chastised each one for attempting to fly without knowing how to avoid crashing. Much as I love chaos, I knew that if I let them get off the ground again I wouldn't actually have any opportunity to talk to Fluttershy, because she'd be entirely occupied with the status of her flying pets, so I snapped the wings away and slithered down the nearest tree, clapping. "Bravo! Bravo! An excellent piece of animal wrangling there, my dear!"
I expected her to eep and back away from me. She did flinch, but then looked up at me resolutely. "Discord, that wasn't very nice," she said, a slight tremor in her voice but no other evidence that she was frightened of me. "One of my animal friends could have seriously gotten hurt!"
"Oh, relax." I teleported over to her and stretched around her, with my tail on one side of her and the rest of me circling her, my face even with hers. "I wouldn't have let anything happen to your cutesy-wutesy pettie-wetties!" I pinched her cheek with my furred fingers, claws retracted -- I wasn't trying to hurt her, just annoy her. "You're just so adorable when you think you can tell me what to do!"
She tilted her head down, mane falling over the side of her face that I'd pinched, as she pulled away. "Um, please don't do that..."
"But you're just so squeezeable!" I picked her up and pulled her to my chest, squeezing her in a mock hug. "How am I supposed to resist?"
She winced again. "This really isn't very comfortable..."
"I bet you'd have no problem with it if Anon was squeezing you," I said, peering down at her upside down.
"It's, um, called hugging, if you're not doing it to be mean, and Anon would let me go if I asked him," she said.
"But you haven't even asked me!"
"That's true... I said I was uncomfortable, though, so Anon would have let me go already. So would you please let me go? Or... at least don't squeeze quite so hard? I mean... if you really need to hug a pony I'm okay with being hugged, I guess, but this sort of hurts a little bit..."
I put her down hurriedly. I wasn't particularly fond of being seen as someone who needed to hug a pony, as if I were desperate for affection or something. "Oh, if you insist. But tell me more about this Anon! I've only met him the once, and we didn't exactly get off on the right foot, but you girls seem to think he's positively the bee's knees."
"Oh, he is," she said dreamily. "He's so sweet and gentle and kind..."
I manifested a glass of pineapple juice just so I could do a spit-take. "Kind? Are we talking about the same creature here?"
"Um... I think so, unless you're talking about someone else named Anon?"
I glared down at her. "Madam, that lout is anything but kind. Did you not see how he murdered all those changelings? Or did you possibly fail to notice how he attacked me with a sword and tried to cut my throat?"
She bowed her head. "It's true... I wish he hadn't done those things. It's... I don't think it's the right way to solve problems, using so much violence like that. Especially not killing." She looked up at me again. "But you have to understand, he's the Element of Protection. He just... gets very upset when his friends are in danger. He's not normally like that. If you're his friend, he's very, very kind to you, but if you hurt his friends..."
"Then he terminates you with extreme prejudice?"
"He's a human," Fluttershy said. "They're obligate omnivores, and dependent on predation for part of their diet unless they're very, very careful to eat the right mix of vegetables, and there's no one place on their homeworld where all the vegetables they need grow naturally. I have to feed him fish, like I feed my bear friends. So they're naturally more violent than ponies, just like griffins and dragons and Diamond Dogs are. Anon's better at killing and violence than ponies are... but he uses that ability to protect us. So he is kind."
I stared down at the little yellow pony, trying not to let fury overwhelm me. A creature who kills for food and to "protect" others is a hero, and I'm a villain? I remember a winter of my childhood, before I'd come into much of my power, when I'd nearly starved to death because I'd refused to kill to eat. Oh, yes, darling Fluttershy, I know all about being an obligate omnivore, and yet I have managed to never murder anything for my dinner in twenty-five hundred years of existence (approximately... I've done a lot of world-walking, so I really have no clear idea how old I am, but it's somewhere around that). I've eaten meat that others have killed when I had no other choice, and once or twice when I was truly desperate I may have granted a mercy killing to a creature that another predator had fatally wounded, and then eaten it, and of course since coming into my full power I've been able to conjure meat for myself without having to kill anything for it... but I have no sympathy whatsoever for the argument that any creature needs to be violent because it's biologically a predator. I'm biologically a predator, and I spend most of my time eating dairy products and sugar.
Well, okay, I eat crabs sometimes, but they're really really stupid. And occasionally spiders, because it's funny, and spiders have no sense of humor. But this animal that Fluttershy is making justifications for has almost certainly eaten cows. Cows on the human world don't talk, but neither do any of Fluttershy's animal friends. She's the last pony I'd have thought would make excuses for an omnivore predator.
I didn't say any of that, because being visibly offended isn't funny, but I went for the jugular, perhaps prematurely. "Oh, well, perhaps that explains it," I said, sighing. "I was wondering how Anon could say such terrible things about any of his friends, and I'd wondered if Pinkie misunderstood somehow..."
"What do you mean?"
"Ah, well, I'm sure Pinkie didn't mean anything by it. You know how she babbles sometimes!"
"It's okay, you can tell me," Fluttershy said. "I won't be offended."
That's what you think, I snickered to myself. "Well, I was having a little chat with her about Anon, just like we're doing now, and I asked her what Anon thought of the rest of you girls. You know, just making small talk. And she told me that he'd told her that you were a... well..." Large blue eyes blinked up at me. "I believe the words she quoted to me were 'pathetic wuss'?"
I expected some sort of declaration that Anon would never say such a thing, or to see tears well up in those baby blues. I never for a moment expected Fluttershy to nod. "I'm sure he does," she said. "Just like I wish he could be kinder sometimes, even when he goes into battle... I'm sure he wishes I could be tougher."
"Wait a minute. The fellow you supposedly love calls you a 'pathetic wuss', and all you do is agree with him?"
"All pathetic really means is that you feel sorry for somepony," Fluttershy said in that completely annoying, quiet, calm voice of hers. "I'm sure Anon does feel sorry for me because it's hard for me to stand up for myself. I did try to be less of a doormat one time, but I didn't like who it turned me into, and Anon knows that. So it must be hard for him, knowing that I could be stronger and tougher and I choose not to be, but that's not who I am. And I know he accepts who I am, even if some parts of me frustrate him."
Some parts of her were certainly frustrating me. "I can't believe you'll just roll over for an insult like that, from your supposed love!" I ranted at her. "Don't you have any self-respect at all?"
"Not really," Fluttershy said, while I attempted to not let my jaw actually fall off my face. "I mean, I do know that I'm worthy of respect, in my mind, but in my heart... well, I've been fighting these feelings all my life, really. Some part of me feels like I'm worthless, and that little part of me always feels sad and always wants to hide away from the world, so it's been very hard for me." I hadn't even unbalanced her to make her more honest or forthcoming. She was just telling me these things. "I think I do a pretty good job of hiding it most of the time, though. Don't you think so? I mean, you'd be the expert..."
I was discombobulated enough to fall for that. "What do you mean, I'd be the expert?"
"Oh, I'm sorry, but it's just obvious to me. You're hiding it too, aren't you? Every time you're near ponies you want attention, but you spend most of your time alone. You don't seem to have any friends, either. Maybe you had some once and you lost them? Or maybe you never did have any? But I can tell you must feel very lonely and isolated, and it must hurt a lot. You do a very good job of hiding it, though! I think you must be much better at hiding it than I am, so that's why I say you must be an expert."
"I don't have low self-esteem!" I raged at her. "I have tremendous respect for myself! If ponies have a problem with me, that's their problem, not mine. I have a perfectly healthy ego, thank you very much! What, do you seriously think that because ponies despise me that's going to affect my feelings about myself in the slightest? Why should I care what ponies think?"
"But you do," she said. "Because if you didn't, you could go create chaos someplace else, somewhere that there are no ponies, and no Elements of Harmony, and you'd be safe. You must want to be with ponies, and care about what they think of you, at least to some extent. I know you feel like it's ponies' problem and not yours, but at the same time... it must really not feel good to need something to survive that everypony is afraid of, I think."
"What are you talking about?"
"Your chaos." She put a hoof on my chest. "You're the spirit of chaos. You can't live without it. But ponies are afraid of chaos, and they hate it, and that must make you very sad deep down inside. It's like... manticores need to eat meat. They don't have a choice about it, they're carnivores. Nopony wants to have a manticore for a pet or be friends with one because they have to kill to live. And not just little things like fish; they kill rabbits and squirrels and even big animals that talk... even ponies, sometimes. So everypony's afraid of a manticore, but the manticore doesn't want to be mean or cruel; it just wants to live, and what it needs to live is the death of other things."
"That's where your analogy breaks down, my dear," I said with my best snide tone. "Chaos doesn't have to hurt or kill ponies. Yes, I need chaos... but so do all of you, you just don't realize it. I have never used chaos to kill ponies unless they were actively trying to kill me at the time, and even then not in two thousand years. So ponies have no reason to be so afraid! It's your problem, not mine!"
"But it is your problem, because it hurts you. You feel like chaos is wonderful, and you want to share it, but nopony wants it, and that hurts. Just now, when you're telling me that chaos doesn't have to hurt ponies? You want ponies to like chaos, I can hear it in your voice." She turned her back on me and took a step away, then looked back. "But... part of the reason they don't is that you do mean things with it, Discord. You made my animals fly around when they didn't know how to fly, and they could have gotten hurt. You made Granny Smith want to dance, and she was laid up in bed for nearly a month after that with her back hips thrown out because she's too old and fragile to dance the way you made her want to. You embarrassed poor Plains Thunder so much he tried to leave his tribe and go off into the desert by himself because several of his tribe saw him ballet dancing. You didn't ask anypony if they wanted to do the things you made them want to do, or if it would be a problem for them if you did it. If you want ponies to learn to love chaos, you need to show them that it doesn't have to hurt them. So far all you've done is embarrass or frighten ponies or break their hearts and make them miserable. If chaos doesn't have to hurt ponies, it's up to you to prove that."
"This is ridiculous!" I teleported in front of her, since it seemed as if she was preparing to walk away from me, as if she were in control of this interview. "You think you know everything about me. You know nothing, little pony!"
"I know when a creature is hurting," she said. "And you're a creature, just like a pony, just like a rabbit. I would try to help you with that, if you would be okay with it, but... I don't think you're ready to ask for help yet. Because you'd have to stop being mean to everypony and just doing anything you want anytime you want, and I don't think you're ready to give that up, and that's why we have to fight you... also you still have Princess Luna hidden someplace, and the Elements. But I really don't want to fight you, Discord. I will if I have to... but I'd rather be kind to you, if you would let me." She smiled up at me. "Maybe that makes me a pathetic wuss, but I'd rather be a pathetic me than a strong, tough pony who isn't really me at all."
I growled in frustration and reached out to her with a claw. That made her shrink back, showing fear for the first time. "Are you going to discord me?" she asked. "Please don't, I hate being mean..."
"Oh, for the love of... I refuse to be that predictable. No, I am not going to 'discord' you, I've done that twice now and it does me no good whatsoever. I'm erasing your memory of this conversation."
"I don't think you're going to do that."
"Why not?" I snickered at her. "Am I supposed to be afraid of your disapproving eyeballs again?"
"You shouldn't do it because it's wrong and it's mean. I don't want to lose my memories. But I know that right now you don't care about that."
"And I suppose you have a reason I do care about?" I said in a bored tone, blowing on my fingers.
"Yes, I think so," she said, and looked up at me. "You don't really want to. You're scared of a pony understanding you because you're afraid I might use it against you somehow... but you like the fact that I care enough to try to understand, and part of you hopes that I could understand you, that maybe you wouldn't have to be completely alone and there would be at least one pony who could feel sympathy for you. If you take my memories away... you'll be totally alone again."
She was looking up at me, her eyes fixed on mine, and I couldn't pull mine away. There was no anger or fear in them, no demands. When she'd used her Stare on me before, it was anger and dominance and the imposition of will, and of course I'd laughed at her, because who can dominate chaos? I pour anger onto my breakfast cereal and eat it with milk. No one dominates me, no one controls me, nopony's anger at me can ever bother me or cow me.
This was worse. I saw Celestia in her eyes, confident that I could control my power, that I wouldn't hurt her, from back in the time when I'd have rather died than cause her pain. I saw her father, the last time I'd seen him, when he'd asked me to protect his daughters if he didn't return -- and he didn't, and I had, at least until Celestia got stupid and trusted when she should have known better, and Luna and I had known better but we didn't stop her because we wanted to believe, too. I saw Luna, squealing with delight and exhilaration rather than fear as she fell, because she believed I would catch her, and I had.
I saw my mother, urging me on, promising that if I kept going despite my exhaustion that we could have a real bed in a real house for once, certain that I could make it if I wanted to, and I had.
I'd betrayed them all, though only Celestia and Luna had lived to know it. I wasn't a good draconequus. I wasn't a protector. I wasn't the best me I could be, the me they had believed in at those moments, and yet here was this pegasus who had no reason whatsoever to trust me and her eyes was so calm and certain. She believed I'd do as she asked. She believed I'd be good.
How wrong you are, I thought, and I tried to reach out again, to kick open the door and take her recent memories, but I couldn't. Those blue eyes paralyzed me. A small part of me realized she'd found a way to make her Stare work on me. I laughed at the anger of ponies... but I cringed at their trust, because I'd broken it so often, and I didn't even want her to trust me, I wanted her to think I was the villain, I wanted to shatter her belief and make her suffer... but damn her, she was right. She'd said the first kind words to me I'd heard from a pony in centuries, the first indication that any pony anywhere could see me as something other than a sealed evil in a can unsealed, something other than a demon of pure evil.
I couldn't erase that.
And she'd known I couldn't, not after she pointed it out. Damn that stupid little pony and her stupid eyes that see too much and her stupid belief and her stupid kindness.
I snarled in frustration and teleported away, leaving her memories intact.
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I really enjoyed the Fluttershy part. It seems like she's the least affected by Anon's brainwashing. Is that because of her innate mental resistance?
I think it's also because Fluttershy is like the reed compared to the oak tree in the parable: Fluttershy bends before the blast, but she pops right up again. Her softness is deceptive; in some ways she's the strongest of Ponies.
... I can't wait to see how this glorious piece of work ends.
Really, Discord accomplished quite a bit, at least with Fluttershy, unapparent though it might seem. After all, he left her memories intact, and for the most part, was actually fairly nice. She’s seen that he’s not evil; not really.
That he’s not a good guy, but that he can be.
And as I understand it, Anon is affecting everyone more or less equally regardless of distance except for Discord, who only has issues when he gets close enough to Anon that he is actually in the reality wrinkle. Which means that Fluttershy was able to see the good in Discord in spite of Anon’s influence.
Yes, we know that Discord’s tail is going to get cut off, and Fluttershy wouldn’t be happy about it. But she knows that Discord can be good, if only someone would reach out to him, and she will certainly plead this to Anon.
Who will proceed to immediately ignore her and do what he wants despite her objections. And I can’t imagine Fluttershy being happy with him being unkind, callous and even cruel when he knows there is another, nonviolent path he can take.
A path he will never, ever take; I think it’s pretty obvious to all of us by the point that Anon’s only real interest in his “herd” is as a distraction while he waits for another threat to appear that will allow him to justify collecting more skulls for the skull throne.
John de Lancie's a connoisseur of campfire songs.
Awww YEAH!!!
This is awesome.
I really hope Discord gets some kind of edge or starts to build up some kind of will-based resistance to the warper 'Anon'.
Otherwise there will be no chance for success.....
Especially if he learns to replicate it. This and coupled with the fact that magic begets magic would mean he would posses a high-yield area-of-effect counterspell. One which might even force the 'Seventh element' into remission and descramble the girls.
I hope he succeeds.... but this is a tragedy right?....
In any case, Onwards, Fair writer. Onwards to adventure!
Best Pony will be Best Pony.
Wow, that was really scary with Fluttershy. She remembers now, and that's a bad thing. Then again it's Fluttershy, hopefully she won't sell out Discord. After all, in canon she reformed him, hopefully that intent will be enough to buy our favorite draconequus some time.
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He left Rarity's memories intact too; he's been trying to get information about Anon, but secondarily to sow dissent and conflict, and if it succeeds he can't wipe their memories or he'll undo his work. So if anypony were to sell him out it would probably have been Rarity.
Fascinating aside about Twilight. Most spellcasters are writing programs. She's herding cats. That means that when something doesn't turn out the way she wanted, the reasons are a bit more complicated than a dropped parenthesis or logic error. Thus, we get orange-frog hybrids.
Meanwhile, Discord is cheesing his abilities like the greatest of munchkins. I'm not sure if I'd love or hate to play a tabletop RPG with him. Wait, no, I'd definitely hate it, and so would he. All those arbitrary rules and regular polyhedra. Bleh.
I do like his minion policy. That's actually something I've touched on a bit when I'm using him as a counterpoint for standard-issue tyrannical baddies and their fashionable scarves. I suspect Discord's low minion count is more out of lack of desire for them than anything else. That, or not wanting to look like he has that desire. Or not wanting to think about why he can't inspire loyalty without slavish adoration.
And yet he didn't understand her comment about TV ratings. Well, between what I'm suspecting is Anon prompting Pinkie to break the fourth wall in more obvious ways and Discord likely having the resistance anyone would to the idea of his own fictionality, I suppose I shouldn't surprised there.
In any case, seeing what has become of Pinkie almost hurt, even though I saw it coming. Comedy is hard, and it's no surprise that an omnipotent incompetent like Anon can't pull it off.
As for Fluttershy, you have to admire her quiet strength. She would like to change, to be a little less afraid, but she still accepts what she knows to be true. No amount of denial will change who and what she is, or who and what she sees in others. Discord just can't deal with someone getting that close, seeing that deeply. Empathy may be his greatest weakness, after magical friendship rainbows.
An excellent chapter. I'm eagerly looking forward to more.
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And that´s how he ended un-tailed, I guess.
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Actually Twilight is both writing programs and herding cats, occasionally at the same time. Twilight is actually quite adept at procedural magic, because she's a unicorn, not a draconequus. She isn't limited the way Discord is. (Discord's draconequuic limitation isn't that all draconequui do chaotic magic, it's that all draconequui are limited to doing magic in accordance with their Principle, and he's the Principle of Chaos and Disharmony. He claims harmonic magic is boring, but the truth is, he really just can't do it.) What's special about Twilight is that her raw power levels and her connection to the fundament of Magic allow her to manipulate raw magic by force of will at all. When Twilight casts a spell and it goes wrong, sometimes the reason is it's her own procedural spell and she didn't adequately debug it to begin with, and sometimes the reason is it's an attempt to follow somepony else's procedural spell and she put too much power into it, and the power decided to do something more fun because the constraint level was developed for the power level of an ordinary unicorn.
When Twilight figures out how chaos magic and harmonic magic tie together and exactly how it is that she's performing magic, she will be in a good position to achieve god-level herself.
And this is how you start from having a major handicap -- only being able to perform a form of magic that is inherently much harder to control than all the other kinds -- and end up an immortal godlike entity. Discord didn't climb to the top of the magic chain by playing fair. :-)
Or all three, plus he can't maintain the infrastructure that allows him to have minions. Most leader-type villains have bases, in a stable location, where the gravity and walls don't shift randomly, and they have a hierarchical authoritarian mindset that works well with being a leader and governing followers. Discord can't be bothered to tell his followers exactly what to do -- he'd need self-starters. But anypony who's ambitious enough to be a self-starter is either someone with a hierarchical mindset, in which case they don't want to follow Discord because his chaotic ways of getting things done aren't efficient enough, or someone with a rebellious mindset, in which case they may love chaos but they won't do what Discord wants them to do because he's an authority figure. Discord could get followers if he turned the charisma up to 11 and surrounded himself with disaffected youth who kind of hero-worship him, but he may not actually know that's possible because normally ponies do not want to be friends with him.
Yes. As a world walker, who's spent time in our world and also a lot of time peering through windows at our world while he was trapped in stone, Discord's quite familiar with our fiction as fiction, but he is not familiar with himself as a fictional character because he's resistant to thinking of himself as such and because "My Little Pony" is only one fiction in a world swimming with it. I can't see Discord preferentially turning to little girls' cartoons about friendship for entertainment. Though he's probably very, very amused by Star Trek: TNG. (He does know that MLP exists, but largely only from his research on Anon, and he prefers to believe that MLP is drawing from and fictionalizing what's happening in his world rather than that he's actually fictional himself.)
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It might be a good thing. She might start spotting when he acts out-of-character and say something that helps him regain control of himself.
She'll never suspect her new human friend of being the cause, of course, but she might still break Discord out of it at a crucial moment in the future...
5167456
This would make her something in the ranks of a god.
ALL hail the yellowness.
5168876
...now I can't help thinking what his reaction might be to voyager. Specifically, The Q and the Grey
5168876
You know, it will be a real tragedy if we never get to see all these frequently-referenced adventures in parallel universes that Discord supposedly had. The concept of Discord adventuring through the multiverse could fill multiple fics just by itself.
More of a nitpick with Discord as a character than a genuine criticism, but as bad as Anon is, Discord can just about go screw himself here for self righteousness. Here's a guy who enjoys torture, (turning people mad, admittedly done so for teh lulz), but killing an animal to consume its flesh because you need to is beyond the pale? Eat a dick, Discord. If he has a problem being an obligate omnivore and not wanting to kill and eat animals thats fine, but he can just piss off by thinking others are somehow wrong for doing so.
That aside this was an excellent chapter.
5172314
Discord is a hypocrite. But that being said, he's not making the argument that obligate omnivores shouldn't eat meat, he's making the argument that obligate omnivores who eat meat should not act as if they're morally superior to him... and he's coming at it from the perspective of growing up in a world where even the non-sapient animals are close to sapience, and having actually been treated himself as a non-sapient animal for part of his life. In the world of Equestria, meat really is murder (and he'll eat animals if he deems them to be stupid enough to be worth eating; he just draws the line at a much, much lower level of sentience than humans do.)
He doesn't actually have a problem with humans eating meat. He has a problem with humans who eat meat having excuses made for them for their violence on the grounds that they have to eat meat, while treating him as if he's a monster. (Also, he's wrong, because Fluttershy, the pony making excuses for the obligate omnivore being violent, is also the only pony in millennia to look at him and say "You have feelings just like a pony and I can tell you're suffering". Fluttershy makes excuses for everyone.)
And yeah, Discord's a total hypocrite. Driving creatures mad is just good clean fun, but killing them, eating them or raping them is beyond the pale, because if you kill something it's no fun anymore and rape is a cheese tactic that just proves you're an uncreative loser. Because it's worse to be uncreative than it is to commit psychological torture, and the worst possible sin is ending the fun. His morality is so blue and orange it's blorange.
Great chapter. I think Discord doesn't have minions because he's so personally powerful, they'd be mostly for show, like alicorn bodyguards, and the only real reason to have them would be for companionship, which Discord would never admit to valuing.
The part with Fluttershy was honestly moving. It's significantly to Anon's detriment that he's warped Fluttershy, otherwise she would probably be helping him in a similar way.
Oh, and you should definitely check out MLP Comics #24 if you haven't already, it's about Discord and Fluttershy, and gives us a lot of backstory on Discord and even pre - Equestria.
All I have to say about this chapter is that it's freaking excellent. The scene with Pinkie was so much fun, I ship the two of them a little harder now than I did before. An I absolutely loved Fluttershy's analysis of Discord.
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We've seen one of them. It ended really, really, really badly for him. :-)
5178592
What I mean is his original adventures. Everything I've heard seems to imply that he was already visiting alternate universes a thousand years ago, during the time that Last Draconequus will presumably cover. I'm saying that I'm really eager to see the young Discord first venturing out beyond his home universe to find all this. Because that could be great to see.
Is there any way to wield all the Elements of Disharmony at the same time? Because I'd think I'd like to try that. I could probably pull it off, actually.
Part with Fluttershy made me tear up.
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For me it seems, he despises killing so much, because death is the highest level of harmony. Stagnation, a particular order he simply must hate.
Living your life in peace, and then dying, is what he would call the most boring thing to happen, therefore he torments, twists other living creatures to his liking to crack that harmonic cycle and make it more interesting, more chaotic.
In fact, if he sees someone as interesting to an exceptional level, worth to observe and torment to his liking, I'd even expect him to give them immortality out of nowhere, if he has the ability to do so that is.
After all, why waste a good plaything, if the others around are much less interesting and out of season.
And yeah is a hypocrite.
First he declares:
But not much later adds:
If I'm not mistaken, you don't go about telling the world that the ones you consider your friends, and your essence essentially (Chaos is magic) are stupid. Besides, didn't he score himself an own goal with that one? If he says magic is stupid, and chaos is magic, isn't chaos stupid as well?
If you interpret his words a bit with a twist, it sounds like he's implying "Chaos is a stupid magic", which I find rather amusing!
So much for the self esteem part, good choice of words Dissy!
fluttershy strikes again! Oh please let her be the one to break free and actually support discord. Seriously the big guy needs some fricking support here! awesome chapter all of it. Especially discords anger at anon corrupting pinkie.
What about pie flavoured pie?
So, the sound wave's polarity was reversed? Neat. Funny how this is actually possible.
5167701 MY COMRADE IN THE WORLD OF CAMPING!!!!!!! I SALUTE YOU!!!!!!!'!!!!!
(How the heck can I was my neck if it ain't gonna rain no more!!!!! I sailed the seven seas in my dirty pbg's, but I never ever never saw a mermaid. A MERMAID!? The princess Pat! (Repeat))
I think that's enough reminiscing for one day.
OH!!! The fic is awesome. Personally loved the Fluttershy 'vs' Discord in this chappie!!!
This is topping the fics where I wonder how thy keep topping themselves.
fuck you fluttershy
Re-reading this chapter for what must be the half-dozenth time, I still found myself crying when her words finally got through to Discord. The reason is because they are deeply true, and the fact that they could touch Discord demonstrates that even this Discord isn't wholly evil. And keep in mind, this is a still unreformed Discord.
It was also a crowning moment of Awesome for Fluttershy in this story. Remember, she's still under Anon's sway. She's in love with Anon and has no reason to regard Discord as anything but her enemy. Yet, Fluttershy's kindness and fundamental decency temporarily overcame Anon's power to let her understand and touch the heart of Discord.
This is also a manifestation of Fluttershy's harmonic power, since she is the Element of Kindness. And she may have also been using, as Discord suspected, a variant of the Stare, perhaps an advanced manifestation of it.
What we're seeing here, also, is a version of the very same emotional dynamic that makes it possible in the main universe for Fluttershy to win Discord's love. This can't happen here and now, because Fluttershy is enthralled by Anon, but you do see Discord, almost against his will, starting to feel friendship toward her. Which is, of course where love starts.
I'm gonna be honest. I hate that Stare crap Fluttershy has. I think its really dumb. When i read a story where a person can resist the Stare or just be unaffected by it. That will earn the story brownie points for.
Then i also hate when people try to psychoanalysis Discord. Then when he gets talked down cause of it also annoys me.
Lastly i know this is a story not really meant to be taken all that seriously. But Anon being able to cause harm to Discord i find annoying. But i guess that's more of just my opinion.
I am enjoying the story. With you making fun of my least liked story types (HIE) Those type of stories are usually really bad and cliché as all hell. So it's funny to see someone take the piss out of them
I love how Fluttershy is trying to reform Discord even when she's not actively "trying to reform Discord", and all while under the influence of Anon.
I'm not sure whether I should be mad at Anon or Fluttershy, or be sorry for Discord.
Wow, that was amazing. And I definitely got that peanut butter reference, I was so happy xD. I wish fluttershy had done that to discord during keep calm and flutter on. Why is it that the MLP staff always miss out on such good character development? So ironic...
Yo wait. We're not supposed to eat chips and somehow survive for seventeen years?