Sage of Harmony (Season 2)

by Eon Seb

The End of Normality Pie's I'm Home

Cornerstone Village

The small village of Cornerstone was a very bland community. It was a town of geo-culturalists (otherwise known as rock farmers). As odd as this profession seems, it is very lucrative as the constant care and maintenance of the rocks allows them to become geodes full of gems of all kinds. The process, however, is very work intensive (leaving VERY little time for fun) when using purely earth pony magic.

The night air of the rock farm was still and quiet (even more so than usual). Not a sound was heard for miles. Not one thing was out of place for the traditional calm normal rock farming family. Despite this, however, Maud shot up from her bed "Things are going to get odd around here tomorrow." She promptly fell back asleep with a mental note to send a letter to Pinkie once the newest wrinkly in their lives was smoothed out.

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Screwball floated into the living room of her new home. She had never been this happy, convincing the doctors to let her leave the facility had been even harder than getting her parents to agree to let Discord be her guardian. In retrospect, that was actually pretty sad. Now, however, she got to live in a pocket reality where gravity could go sideways and the ground could go from dirt to cheese to chocolate in 3 seconds. It felt so good to be home. Discord was currently using his magic to simultaneously make breakfast, pack a lunch, finish Screwy's paperwork for school and check a map to find the farm. He knew where it was, dang it! He did not need directions!

"Hello. My name's Screwball. Please take care of me."

Screwball focused on keeping her eyes moving instead of letting them lock onto her sister. They had considered enrolling her in the Canterlot prep school, but one day looking around was enough to last her a lifetime. Most of the ponies there looked down their noses at her just because she showed up without a uniform for a tour. So they had agreed that if Ponyville was good enough for the Heiress of the Moon, it was good enough for the Heiress of Chaos.

While Screwy was getting to know her classmates, Discord was realizing why he forgot where the farm was "Cornerstone? But that's the most boring town in Equestria!"

It had won this not-so-prestigious award every year running since they started keeping a record of such things. This was not going to be fun. His chaotic powers tried to pull him away from all things normal with good reason; he discovered very quickly that even doing one thing normally was risky to his continued existence. Thankfully, having Screwball around lowered the risk of him fading significantly.

Now he just had keep focused long enough to get to the farm.

"This is not going to be easy."

Discord was teleporting around trying to end up in the town by happenstance. (His brain refused to focus on the town, It was literally so boring that it took a massive effort to remember it even existed.)

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Screwball, meanwhile, was getting used to being in class with other ponies while keeping a lid on her powers. Thankfully, with Diamond and Silver behaving, no pony had taken up the mantle of school bully yet. It was not until she started making the balls fly around during recess that anypony realized something was going on. By the time class resumed, the playground had been turned into rubber and the kids had been all played out. Cheerilee had never seen this class pay so much attention, and, with the price of bad behavior being losing out on playing in the new rubber land, she had a feeling behavior was going to be at an all time high.

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Igneous Pie felt a chill go down his spine. He had been dealing with one of his 'senses' for days. It kept switching between the one he got when Pinkie was coming for a surprise visit and the one meaning life for the farm was going to be changed beyond all recognition. Each of the girls could feel something as well. The only one of them not on edge was Cloudy. No matter what they showed her, she refused to believe in the Pie Family Sense. She just viewed it as some collective insanity that came with being part of the family.

This idea was about to be tested thoroughly.

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Discord popped into another new area with gray sky, gray ground and gray houses (I would go further, but I think you get the idea).

"Dear me. This IS boring. Looks like the right place."

Discord started to walk into town then noticed everypony staring at him with frozen smiles, and the same hair and they all had the same mark.

"Nope. Still the wrong town." He quickly snapped his fingers and got out of there faster than Celestia could eat a cake (though he couldn't shake the image of Midnight and her friends finding this place by accident and changing things for the better in a year or two.)

Starlight blinked before shrugging and going back to planning how to collect more cutie marks with additional plans to deal with whatever that was which just showed up.

**********

Marble noticed a flash of light revealing something which had to be from one of her twin's worst dreams, and once again she lamented her muteness, "I don't want to die yet but nothing short of shrieking will get the others over here and this thing will notice me way before that." With no other option to avoid being detected, Marble curled into a ball and used her mane and tail to look like a big rock.

Discord blinked. This place looked familiar, With a deep breath Discord forced himself to think back to the happier times when he and Pudding had argued over the best way to set up the rock farm for maximum magic absorption . Everything was still in the right place. South for Spring, West for Summer, North for Fall and East for Winter. However, sometime during the past 1000-plus years, somepony had repainted/rebuilt the house and silo. The house was originally made of red river rock and the silo had been sandstone with a delightful yellow and brown spiral pattern.

"Well it always worked in the past."

Discord stretched before snapping his fingers and causing color to bleed back into the buildings. He heard a yell and a sound like a small army approaching immediately.

"Always works."

Now he just had to sit back and wait.

Igneous felt his gut drop. He had just watched two buildings change color faster than when he gave Pinkie a paint brush (Something he was never doing again)

"Girls! South field! Now!"

eleven seconds later, they were all staring at whatever this thing was who was staring at them each with equal intensity (It grew three more heads and proceeded to match each of their expressions.) the creature tapped a claw to it's chin

"Let me guess Clyde, Inky and Blinky."

He paused before turning to Cloudy and Trixie (who had just managed to get there.) Mrs. Pie, Magician.

Maud just Blinked at him "Maud, Limestone, Igneous, and Cloudy Quartz, that's Trixie." This was said in her usual deadpan as she walked over to a large rock "Marble, come on out. I'll keep you safe."

Discord watched the rock unfold into a pony while thinking about their names "I knew there had to some kind of theme here. I just guessed the wrong one. Now then to complete our introduction, I am Discord, Spirit of Chaos. With that out of the way, let's get down to business. I want to test the mana flow around here. These rocks used to be able to make pink gems with polka dots and checkerboard pattern gems from one rock."

This day would go down in the family as the day that normality ended. Some members also called it the return of chaos. Discord showed the family secrets lost to time on how to fuel the rock to produce gems of any kind or color. This was going to take a lot of practice to get the desired results. The process was simple (just push a little chaos in while rolling the rocks around) but focusing to get the gem you wanted was the hard part.

He explained to them that the sense they all had was a chaos based form of divination. Due to its origin, it was seen more as a medical condition then an accurate form of telling the future (which was ironic as the Pie family had more accurate predictions under its collective belt then most of history's best seers put together).

The only cloud (for Discord) was Trixie, who only remained annoying until he got fed up and removed her mouth with a snap of his fingers (Maud convinced him to give it back before leaving, though).

Discord helped them out in his own way before he would teleport away at the end of the day. Trixie also finally learned to keep her mouth shut (after getting it taken away three more times).

He worked with them for about a week before showing up with a purple filly who quickly proved her chaos was just as strong as that of her 'father'.

It took a month of stress, practice and chocolate but they all mastered the art of chaos infusion (Yes even Trixie.) Discord left for a final time after procuring Invites for the holidays. Things were looking up for the old coot and life was weird, just as it should be.

Comments

[Comickook]

Very little I can say thanks for sharing this chapter AND for letting me help you with the edits. You, of course, did an excellent job on the exchanges, characterizations, humor and future chapter set-up in all the right places. Well, on to the next chapter.