If there's anypony you can trust with responsibility, anypony who will always have a place in the community, it's Applejack. So it seems until she unexpectedly becomes the most powerful being in Equestria.
Applejack is a steadfast, reliable pony. Loyal to her family and friends, always ready to take responsibility, she’s someone who found her place in the world a long time ago. And she’s happy with it.
But anything can change.
Now she’s faced with a question: where’s the place in the world for a pony who can accidentally turn a mountain inside out by thinking too hard?
Also available as a custom-tailored ebook because I’m some kind of psycho who thinks XML is “fun”: EPUB, AZW3, MOBI
“I will never use my Element of Harmony against you.” Fluttershy took off her butterfly-shaped necklace, the only thing standing between Discord and, well… everything else, and let it fall to the ground.
As much as Applejack wanted Discord to fix the flooding in her farm, she had a feeling that her naïve friend had just made a very bad deal.
“Excellent!” With a snap of Discord’s fingers, the flooding in Sweet Apple Acres was… frozen solid. “There, much better! I do prefer ice skating to water skiing, don’t you?”
Ice skating. It looked like Discord was obeying his crazy whims instead of returning Fluttershy’s respect. What a surprise.
Well, Fluttershy looked surprised, at least. “Discord! That’s not fixing it! Why, I oughta…”
“It’s not? I’m afraid I don’t see what you mean, Fluttershy! This farm is better than it was before! Apples are boring. Ice skating,” he did a pirouette, “is fun!” He skated over to the ponies and dragon standing on the recently-created shore. “Ah, but I see the problem. I’m hogging all the fun to myself! How rude of me.” He snapped his fingers again, and seven sets of white ice skates appeared before them.
“Whoa,” Spike remarked, looking down at his pair. “I’ve never seen dragon ice skates before.”
“My own design.” Discord pointed to one scaly foot. “They’re quite comfortable.”
Spike was getting distracted. “We don’t want to go ice skatin’ with you, Discord!” Applejack interjected. “What we want is for you to fix my farm!”
Spike snapped out of it. “Yeah!” He kicked one skate a foot away from him. “If you don’t, we’ll turn you back to stone!” He picked up the Element of Kindness from the ground and offered it to Fluttershy.
Fluttershy hesitated, looking angrily at Discord, then reluctantly at Spike, then back. Twilight chimed in. “It’s the only power we have over him, Fluttershy. The Princess will understand!”
Fluttershy’s gaze settled on Discord. After spending a few seconds countering his smug smile with as much contempt as her face could express, she spoke. “I made a promise not to use my Element against him, and I’m going to keep it.”
“Ta-daaa!” Discord did a few triumphant leaps and spins on the ice. “And that, my little ponies, is the power of integrity! Maybe now you can see why I don’t bother keeping my promises.”
“Fluttershy!” Applejack had to agree with the crafty chimera on this one. “This is the Element of Honesty talkin’—there are some things more important than keepin’ promises!”
“Yeah, he just broke a promise to you!” Rainbow Dash hovered near Fluttershy’s face. “An eye for an eye, right? Anything goes!”
Fluttershy looked over her shoulder at her friends. Applejack was too busy looking at her pleadingly to see if the others were doing the same, but she could have guessed they were.
“Oh, please.” Discord looked smug. “Can’t you see it’s pointless? Fluttershy’s too kind to break a promise. You might as well accept your fate and go skating with me! Would you like your skates in a different color?” He snapped his fingers once more, and seven pairs of bright orange skates appeared in addition to the ones already there. Rarity recoiled.
“Or a different pattern?” he suggested. Snap. Now there were plaid skates of yellow and blue.
“Oh, yes. That’s much better than white, far more wintery. In fact…” Waves of plaid spread out across the snow from where he stood, covering the landscape. Rarity raised a hoof to her forehead and fainted into the garish slush.
“This snow looks tasty,” Pinkie Pie remarked.
“Pinkie Pie, you know you’re not supposed to eat yellow snow, right?” Twilight lifted a hoof apprehensively.
“It’s not just yellow. It’s yellow and blue! And together, that makes…” Pinkie mixed together the two colors with her hoof. “Red? Wow, that’s even yummier than green!” She buried her face in the snow and came back up looking delighted. “It tastes like oranges!”
“That’s the spirit, Pinkie Bye! Oh, and you have to try the apples. You can’t reach them, though, can you? Here, let me turn the trees upside-down for you.” He snapped his fingers.
“My apple trees!” Applejack gasped. “And the apples, what’d you do to them? Fluttershy, you gotta stop him!”
Fluttershy had gone from angry to dejected. “I’m sorry, everypony,” she said, turning around. “There’s nothing I can do. I’m just going to go home.”
“No way!” Rainbow Dash followed her. “You could fix this so easily! And look at how awful he’s being to you. Do you really still think he’s your friend?”
“Not anymore.” She sounded like she was holding back tears.
“My, my, what a shame,” said Discord as she walked away. He turned away from her and addressed the remaining Element bearers. “Who knows? Maybe your magic friendship beams will work without her! Give it a try!” He turned around to reveal a sign on his back saying “FRiEND ME”.
“Another trap,” said Applejack. “He wouldn’t suggest it if it was gonna work.”
“No,” said Twilight. “I think he just wants to rub it in. I say we do it. What other choice is there?”
“We could let the Princesses know what’s happened!” Spike pulled a quill and parchment from… wherever he keeps those things.
“Oh, that’s a good one, Spine. I didn’t think of that.” Discord snapped his fingers, and a spring burst out of the ground, sending Spike and a fair amount of colorful snow flying to parts unknown. “Whoops! Looks like that idea won’t work. Any more suggestions?”
“Why do you really want us to do it, Discord?” Rainbow Dash touched down near Applejack.
“Maybe you should try listening to your purple unicorn friend. Purple’s the second-smartest color, you know. Now, I don’t have all day.” “FRIEND ME,” announced a neon sign, blinking into existence above him.
“Let’s just try it,” said Twilight. “He’s been wrong about the Elements not working before.”
Applejack sighed. It wouldn’t fix her farm, but… “Alright. Maybe it’ll work. Who’ll wear Fluttershy’s Element, though?”
“I can,” volunteered Discord.
“Be our guest!” said Rainbow Dash. “It’ll probably bite you.”
“Oh, I’m not so sure about that.” An oversized crown appeared on his head, helpfully labeled “KiNG” in dripping red paint. “‘King’ is only one letter away from ‘kind’, and how smart can it be? It’s a friendship necklace.”
There really weren’t a whole lot of options. “I’ll wear it,” said Applejack. “The Element of Honesty and the Element o’ Kindness. I may not be as nice as Fluttershy—and maybe that’s a good thing,” she added, giving the rascal who’d exploited the kind pegasus a scornful look—“but I do try my hardest.”
“Two Elements?” Twilight asked nervously.
“Wow!” Pinkie Pie bounced up and down excitedly. “If this works, you’ll go down in history as the kind-and-honest-est-est-est pony ever!”
Rainbow Dash seemed less impressed. “So, what,” she said, “we’re actually going to do what he says?”
And indeed, Discord was smiling. “Two Elements on one pony?” he pondered. “I’ve heard that can have very unpredictable results. Downright chaotic, if you catch my drift.”
“He’s right,” said Twilight. “There isn’t much written on the Elements of Harmony, and the Princesses can be pretty tight-lipped about them, but I’ve read some theories here and there. An alicorn can use more than one Element at the same time, but a regular pony like you or me supposedly just doesn’t have enough magic to control them. If the power of the Elements is released without proper guidance… the results will be even less predictable than Discord’s own magic.”
“I see his plan now.” Rainbow Dash flew right up in the face of the most powerful being in Equestria. “He wants the Elements to backfire on us. That way, even if Fluttershy comes back, we won’t be able to use them.”
“But even he doesn’t know just what’ll happen. Bit of a gamble, isn’t it?” asked Applejack.
“Gamble? Me?” Discord yanked Rainbow Dash’s wing. Her eyes began to spin like reels on a slot machine. “Never!” Both eyes landed on cherries.
“Sti—gak!” Rainbow Dash gagged. She coughed up a cherry. “Still, he—urrk!” Another cherry. “It’s his—gkkk!” Two cherries this time. “His plan i—guh… nnn… mmp…” After spending a few moments looking like she had tried to swallow an apple whole, Rainbow Dash vomited a waterfall of plump, red cherries, which Discord caught in a bucket. She then fell to the ground.
“Jackpot! I love cherries!” He tossed a few into his mouth. “Want some?” He spoke with his mouth full, offering the bucket to Applejack, who, having seen where its contents came from, backed away. Discord shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He spat the pits into the air, and they began to orbit around his head like little moons.
Rainbow Dash got up, panting. “Let’s hit him with everything we’ve got.”
“I had no idea you hated cherries so much, Rainy Days.” Discord pulled out a notepad, a pencil, and a pair of half-moon spectacles. “Is that the result of some childhood trauma, perhaps?” He jotted down some notes.
“It’s Rainbow Dash!” she snarled. Twilight used her magic to pick up the Element of Kindness and dust the snow off of it. She glanced concernedly in the direction Spike had been launched earlier.
Discord wrote furiously. “Patient is having difficulty remembering her own name.” Twilight tried to put the Element around Applejack’s neck, but it didn’t fit over the one already there.
“Just put it on backwards,” Applejack suggested.
“But then the magic beam will be facing the wrong way.”
“You sure that’s how it works?”
“Are you sure it isn’t?”
“Fair enough. Upside-down, then?”
Twilight pulled the necklace away from Applejack’s neck, flipped it around, and put it back on. It was a tight and extremely uncomfortable fit, but after a few moments, she got the clasp in the back closed.
Discord clapped his hands and laughed. “You should see yourself, Apple Mac! You look quite intimidating with double the weaponized harmony power.”
“Really now?” Discord, now wearing sunglasses and a floral-patterned shirt, set a lawn chair down on the ice and reclined in it. The ponies got into formation.
“Have you ponies no imagination?” he asked. Twilight, after a nervous look over her shoulder, activated the Elements with her horn.
“I’m hoping it will turn you all into beetles, and you’ll discover a beetle kingdom in dire need of your help to depose their beetle tyrant and return the true beetle king to his rightful place on the beetle throne.” The Elements began to fire their cutie mark-shaped beams at Discord.
“Then Beetle Pinkie Pie turns out to be a traitor and kills the whole royal family with poison gas!” The five of them rose into the air with a burst of rainbow energy. The Element of Loyalty coughed up a cherry.
“See? There are much more interesting things to hope for. Maybe not practical things, but…” A rainbow ribbon of pure harmonic power was descending on him. Or maybe not so pure—a dark streak ran down the middle, right between sky blue and bright yellow.
“There are so many possibilities to think of. All it takes is a little imagination.” Discord wasn’t turning to stone.
“You ponies never seem to appreciate that.” His expression was contemplative. A menacing aura surrounded him in the midst of the rainbow, crackling and dancing with chaotic patterns and bursts of light.
“Always thinking about what’s real and what’s practical.” He looked almost sadly at the ponies. His strange glow began to spread through the rainbow, contaminating it.
“Reality’s no fun. Why spend all your time thinking about reality, of all things?” Applejack was getting nervous. She had a feeling that the strange energy approaching them was Discord’s unpredictable results, and it didn’t look good.
“And when somebody tries to make it fun, well…” Applejack was beginning to feel the effect of Discord’s whatever-it-was. It pressed down on her mind. Darkness clouded the edges of her vision, even though she was surrounded by colorful light.
“Everyone loses their minds…” Discord seemed to trail off as Applejack lost consciousness.
The last thing Applejack remembered was using the Elements against Discord and fainting. What had happened since then?
“…and then they both passed out.” She imagined Twilight telling the story.
“Applejack and… this fellow?” The stallion who was speaking would be Doctor… Doctor… Doctor Horse.
“Applejack and Discord, yes.” Applejack had the terrible feeling she was being too optimistic.
“I’m still having a hard time believing this is Discord.”
“We’re pretty sure it’s him. Discord was sitting in a lawn chair on the ice, and we found this stallion lying on the ground in the same place.” She wasn’t sure where that idea came from. Discord as a stallion? Applejack pictured it: a khaki unicorn with a black mane. His horn didn’t match his body; instead, it was the same light blue color his left horn was as a draconequus. His eye color… she couldn’t figure out, since he was apparently unconscious, so his eyes would probably be closed. Yes, unconscious and lying on a wooden hospital bed under purplish covers, facing her.
In fact, she could envision the whole room. The walls would be striped in slightly different shades of blue. The ceiling would be green. The floor would be checkered in a washed-out yellow color. On a bedside table next to her would be a purple lamp, a green tissue box, and her hat. A number of ponies would be there to visit her. Twilight, of course, since she was the one talking. Rainbow Dash. Rarity. Pinkie Pie. Fluttershy, probably, if—if—they had managed to defeat Discord without her. Spike? No, not Spike. If he was still lost, Twilight wouldn’t be so calm, but, even though Applejack wasn’t sure where she thought he would be, she had a feeling it wasn’t here. Her family… no, that would be way too many ponies at once. And no visitors for Discord, obviously. Then there was the doctor with his glasses, lab coat, and stethoscope.
Something was very wrong. She shouldn’t have been able to imagine all of that so quickly and easily. In her mind, she pawed at some orange hairs on the bed that would have come out of her coat. Every one was a slightly different length, and they caught the light just like hairs would…
“Applejack! You’re awake!” Oh, right. Someone would probably notice if she moved. Fluttershy was approaching as the others turned to look.
“Am I?” She had been looking at the fur on her bed, so her eyes were open. She looked up at Fluttershy, though there wasn’t much point, since, despite the bewildering realism, none of this seemed to actually be real. “You sure?”
“Definitely!” Pinkie Pie bounced over. “Either that, or I’m asleep, too, and we’re sharing a dream. Or maybe I’m just a part of your dream.” She gasped. “Oh, no! Don’t wake up, Applejack! If you do, we’ll all disappear!”
“If this is a dream, then none o’ y’all are real, so why’s it matter if I wake up?”
“I feel pretty real. And if I’m real, then you can’t wake up. Phew!” She drew her hoof across her forehead as if wiping off perspiration. “That’s a relief. Existential crisis averted!”
Applejack chuckled. “I’m pretty sure I’m imaginin’ all this,” she said.
“Why would you think that, Applejack?” asked Rarity.
“She’s probably exhausted,” said Doctor Horse. “Which means—”
“I don’t think so, doc.” Applejack didn’t feel tired, just disconnected. Since it was imaginary, she could view the room from any angle, and she found that, most of the time, she had been looking down from a spot above herself instead of through her own eyes. Her body was like a puppet she could use to interact with the contents of her own mind, not really containing her. She used it to chuckle. “I can prove it, too.”
She imagined her bed floating off the ground, carrying her with it. She put her hooves behind her head and smiled at the awestruck ponies below her, then decided to raise them up, as well.
“Applejack?” Twilight looked down at the ground. “Are you doing this?”
“Ee-yup!” Applejack was already beginning to feel like a god. Imagining was pretty fun. Why didn’t she do it more often? She tried to think of other things she could impress her imaginary friends with.
“Oh, and how ’bout this? Now we’re all alicorns! Y’all can fly on your own now.” Pretending to use her new wings, she flew out of bed. She realized she wasn’t wearing her hat and, with a thought, made it leap onto her head.
“No way… I’m—hkk!” Rainbow Dash coughed up a cherry, but she seemed too preoccupied by the new addition to her forehead to be annoyed. “I’m magic!”
“I think I know what happened!” Twilight said. The ponies were still held aloft by Applejack’s willpower rather than their own wings, and Twilight Sparkle was now anxiously treading the air. It was a bit distracting. Applejack involuntarily summoned a dragon claw to hold one flailing hoof in place, and Twilight stopped moving. “Applejack,” she shook the claw off, “you have Discord’s powers now! The Elements of Harmony transferred them to you!”
Applejack froze. “Discord’s powers?” She gently floated the bed and the ponies to the ground. Was this not her imagination, but real life? Did that even make sense?
“Yes!” Twilight drummed the floor excitedly with her hooves, then laughed. “Yes! You’ve got Discord’s powers, Applejack!”
There was a moment of stunned silence.
Then everyone started talking at once.
“Oh, my gosh, Applejack, that’s so cool! You can do anything now! You can—”
“Oh, my goodness. I’m so happy for you, Applejack.”
“I simply cannot believe your good fortune, Applejack! I’m certain these powers are in good—”
“This is going to be so great! It’ll be just like if Discord was good, and grew apples, and was Applejack! Do you think—”
Applejack was beginning to feel overwhelmed. Zippers appeared on their mouths, silencing them.
“Whoops,” said Applejack. “Didn’t mean to do that.” With a rather pointless wave of her hoof, she removed the zippers.
Equestria’s one and only alicorn stallion glanced at his similarly-endowed company and cleared his throat. “Well, if you have Discord’s powers, there isn’t much we can do for you here. You’d best be on your way, Applejack.”
“Right. Yeah.” Applejack got out of bed in the normal way. She wasn’t sure what she thought of having Discord’s powers yet, and she didn’t want to use them until she was. Well, except for… “We all probably shouldn’t be alicorns.” She waved again, and the room was lightened of four horns, five pairs of wings, and, as evidenced by a few groans, some degree of everyone’s good spirits.
“I need to get this chaos magic business figured out,” she said, walking towards the door. “Seeya, doc.”
“So long, Applejack,” said the doctor. “Take care with that chaos magic. It’s a big responsibility.”
“I hear you.” She entered the hallway, and her friends followed.
Finally, Rainbow Dash spoke again. “Discord’s powers? That’s awesome!” She zipped past Applejack and turned to face her. “You can do whatever you want now, Applejack!”
Applejack nodded in acknowledgement. “I s’pose I can.”
“I mean, forget apple farming! You could take over the world if you wanted to!”
“I don’t think so.” Twilight looked over her shoulder. “The last guy who tried that is going to the dungeon as soon as he wakes up.”
“Yeah, but he was crazy. I bet Applejack could do it, no problem! Right, Applejack?”
Applejack chuckled. “I don’t know. I don’t really want to take over the world.”
“Well, yeah. That makes sense. But think of all the other stuff you can do!” Rainbow Dash hovered right in front of Applejack, moving backwards. “Literally anything.”
“Yeah!” Pinkie Pie chipped in. “Think of all the great stuff Discord did! In fact, think of all the bad stuff Discord did! You can do that, too!”
Applejack rolled her eyes. “Would y’all stop tryin’ to tell me how I can use my powers for evil? That ain’t exactly what I’ve got in mind for ’em.”
“So, what do you have in mind?” asked Rarity.
“I haven’t got figured that out yet.” Applejack went through the hospital doors. “And, uh, if y’all don’t mind, I need a moment to get it figured out. So, if I could have a moment alone…?”
The five of them glanced at each other uncertainly. Rarity spoke. “Well, don’t worry too much about it, Applejack. This is truly a gift! And you know you can always come to us for advice if you need to.”
The others nodded their assent. “Thanks, everypony,” said Applejack. “Bye, now.” And with that, she left her friends and began to walk through Ponyville. When she was technically out of hearing, her vision of Rainbow Dash, who, apparently, was also the real Rainbow Dash, spoke.
“What’s with her?”
“You heard her,” said Twilight. “It’s a lot to take in all at once. Just give her time.”
* * *
She hadn’t been entirely sure where she was going, and, probably because of chaos magic, her wandering had taken a strange turn; she had found herself floating on a cloud in some unknown part of the sky, reclining in one of Rainbow Dash’s characteristic positions. It was a secluded spot, and it seemed like a good place to get her thoughts in order.
What she had the hardest time grasping was the idea that the world around her was real. It still seemed imaginary, like it was all inside her head, but there was far too much detail for that to be true. She tried closing her eyes (even though there was no point, since she didn’t see things in the normal sense anymore) and clearing her mind to see if she could wake up into whatever realer reality she had been in before the Elements of Harmony had their malfunction. That didn’t work, and, when she tried imagining again, all she could picture was herself, high in the sky, surrounded by clouds. Well, at least clearing her mind hadn’t destroyed the world.
A terrible thought struck Applejack. What if she was dead? That possibility suddenly seemed more real than anything she had experienced since waking up. Her peculiar calm broke immediately, and she sat up on the cloud. That would mean Discord had won for good, since, without the Element of Honesty, no one could oppose him. Fluttershy would blame herself… and she wouldn’t even be wrong per se. Applejack frowned worriedly. What would Apple Bloom do without her in a world ruled by chaos?
But if she was dead, then who were all the ponies she had seen since then? Surely they hadn’t all died, too. And if they had, why hadn’t they all gotten Discord’s powers like she had? Applejack began to relax. No, she was pretty sure she was alive. That meant this was reality. And that meant…
…She had all of Discord’s powers. In reality.
As far as she could tell, those powers were controlled by her imagination. She stood up on the cloud and looked out at the sky around her, dotted here and there with clouds. They began to move, gathering themselves to form a shape.
Applejack’s head.
She stared at it. Was that the best she could come up with? Really? She was just utterly astounded by how awful her imagination was. She drew the white face closer to her and kicked it. In the face.
The whole thing, several times her size, dissipated, and it occurred to her that she probably would have made a good sky-clearer if she had been a pegasus. Anyway, however uncreative, the experiment had worked. Anything she imagined would become real. So, she definitely should not imagine…
“No, Applejack, don’t think about that,” she said aloud. “You’ll just end up destroyin’ the world.”
Destroying the world? The apocalypse? Yes, that would be a terrible thing to imagine.
The sky turned crimson around her. Dark clouds filled the sky, swirling above. Meteors began to punch through the cloud layer, burning white and plummeting towards Equestria below her.
“No! No, no, no!” She concentrated on making it stop, but about half of that effort seemed to go into thinking about what she was trying to stop, which wasn’t particularly helpful. She managed to clear the sky and turn it blue again, but she couldn’t get the meteors to go away. They jittered through the sky as if confused. At least they weren’t hitting the ground, but Applejack couldn’t keep this going forever.
Maybe she could turn them into something harmless. Giant apples came to mind, but she didn’t think those would be any better than meteors and oh look they were apples now. Then they were cherries. Then they were rather poorly-remembered renditions of Discord’s head. Then they were clouds. Oh, clouds! That was perfect.
Then they were apples again. Great. Applejack tried imagining the apples being eaten by invisible giants.
“Oh, come on… Just eat the cores! Y’ain’t even, real, why’re you so picky?” She frustratedly shoved the cores down their throats and then did her best to stop thinking about giant things in the sky.
So, this was chaos magic. In all her adventures, Applejack had never come across anything half as dangerous as chaos magic. She wondered if this power was safer in Discord’s hands; he, at least, had enough experience using it to be able to simply rule the world instead of destroying it.
Applejack shook her head. No, she was a pony who could be trusted with dangerous things. She drew herself up to her full height and spoke to the empty sky. “If anypony can keep a lid on Discord’s magic, it’s either me or Princess Celestia. And on her name, I swear to use it responsibly and protect the world from, uh… me.” She shook her head. “I mean, from chaos!”
An imaginary crowd began to cheer and applaud. “Oh, boy.” Applejack silenced it sheepishly. “This ain’t gonna be easy.”
* * *
Applejack entered the gate to Sweet Apple Acres feeling pretty good about herself. On the way back, she had managed to avoid accidentally conjuring almost anything. There was that one giant spider that had attacked a pony passing on the street, but a tree had fallen on it. Looking back on it, that was probably also a bout of accidental chaos magic, which was a bit frustrating. Nopony was hurt, though. That’s what counted.
She was pleased to see that, just like last time, the Elements of Harmony had reversed all of Discord’s changes; she wanted to avoid using his magic whenever possible. With the farm dry and right-side up, it was a perfect time to paint the new chicken coop.
The first step was to get a bucket of paint and a brush. She identified the shed near the house where they were kept and started on her way.
Of course, she didn’t really have to walk there… She shut down that train of thought before she accidentally visualized something.
It was quite a long way, though. She hadn’t really noticed that before, or at least, not since she was a filly. How did she normally occupy herself while making this trek?
Well, she didn’t need chaos magic to get there faster. She began to canter, then to gallop. With some concern, she noticed that, since she was just imagining herself travelling quickly instead of moving her body like a normal pony, the rather extreme pace didn’t tire her. Did that count as using Discord’s magic recklessly? …No, of course not. What was she supposed to do, never move again?
Applejack slowed to a trot as she approached the shed, then back to a walk as she opened the door. The inside was cluttered with various tools and materials for use around the farm, and, despite the door and three windows letting in the sun, the lighting was poor towards the backs of the shelves. The bucket and brush were usually kept together… wherever they were. Finding things in here was never easy.
But before she could start looking, she was struck with the sudden realization that she was perfectly aware of every item in the shed, despite the poor visibility and complete lack of organization. She didn’t have to search for things like a normal pony; the whole scene was laid out clearly in her mind.
There was one problem, though. She could have found a scrub brush in the shed. She could have found several wooden buckets. She could have found any of nine trowels, though she wasn’t sure why they owned so many of the things. She was certain, however, that this shed contained no paint brushes or paint buckets, not even ones of the wrong color.
Nonetheless, she began to look through the shed out of habit. Was there a paint bucket behind this bag of fertilizer?
…Yes. She sighed. Yes, there was a bucket of red paint. But it had not been there a moment ago, and this farm was chaos magic-free. It would have to go.
She picked it up and turned around to find the shelves around her covered in red paint buckets. Somehow, she had managed to trick herself into thinking she didn’t “see” them with her back turned, even though she was the one who had accidentally created them. She looked around with frustration. “Aw, hayseed. How’m I gonna get rid of all this paint?”
The buckets began to vanish. However convenient this was, Applejack didn’t have to think too hard about it to decide that making things disappear was not a safe use of Discord’s magic. She tried to stop the process before something bad happened.
She reversed it instead.
As she realized that she was making the mistake of actually summoning paint buckets again instead of removing them, she involuntarily sped up the process. Buckets continued to appear only on the shelves, but they began to run into each other with dull, metallic thuds and shove each other off. Red paint splattered everywhere as buckets came open on impact with the floor, but the floor itself was becoming less and less visible under the buckets at an alarming rate.
“Oh, no. Oh, no, this is bad.” Waterfalls of buckets were falling off the shelves. “I’ve gotta stay in control. Come on, Applejack!” She concentrated on stopping the flow of buckets, but they were starting to genuinely overwhelm her, which made it hard to focus. Paint buckets were spilling out of the door. Then the shed ran out of room, and they were being forced out of the door, taking Applejack, now buried, with them.
Her head broke the surface as she was carried out into a shallower and calmer area of the flow of buckets, and she managed to stop the process. Now it was time to assess the damage…
“Wow, Applejack. Whaddaya need all this paint for?”
Applejack slowly turned around. “Apple Bloom? How long’ve you been here for?”
“Since a few seconds ago when we noticed all these buckets coming out of the shed.” Sweetie Belle was here, too? Applejack hadn’t noticed.
“We figured it must have been your new powers. Apple Bloom told us all about them! That’s why we were looking for you.” And there was Scootaloo, which made three out of three Crusaders. Great.
Applejack looked back at her sister. “How’d you find out about that, Apple Bloom?”
“When me ’n’ Granny Smith ’n’ Big Mac went to visit you at the hospital, we ran into Pinkie Pie. She told us you were outta the hospital and had all o’ Discord’s powers.” She grinned up at Applejack. “An’ it looks like you really do! So we were wonderin’ if you could help us with somethin’.”
“But first, what’s with this huge pile of buckets?” Scootaloo tapped one with her hoof. “You could paint all of Equestria red with this much paint!”
“Red?” Applejack said with a start. She looked around at the paint buckets. “Oh, consarn it! I wanted to paint the chicken coop blue, not red!”
“The chicken coop?” Apple Bloom looked over her shoulder at the distant and decidedly not Equestria-sized building.
Sweetie Belle furrowed her brow. “Why do you need all this paint for one little chicken coop?”
“Uh. Ahem,” Applejack cleared her throat and, against her better judgement, erased all of the paint buckets. She controlled her relief when it seemed to work as intended and, now back on her hooves, addressed the Crusaders. “Look, y’all, this here was just an accident, alright? I was tryin’ to find a bucket o’ real paint to use, and Discord’s magic just got all outta control. I’ll get the—”
“Oh, like that big meteor storm earlier?” Sweetie Belle interrupted. “Everyone says—”
“Shush!” Applejack interrupted her in turn. “Like I was sayin’, I’ll get the hang of it. But until then, just… try not to give my powers any ideas, okay?”
The three of them looked at her blankly.
“What I mean is, don’t talk about things like… ‘meteor storms’ around me,” Applejack tried to focus on the words instead of their meaning, “or else they might happen.”
The Crusaders exchanged alarmed looks. “That sounds really dangerous,” said Scootaloo.
“O’ course it’s dangerous! That’s why I don’t want y’all pushin’ your luck. But don’t worry, I’ll get the hang of it, like I said. It’ll be fine, long as nopony—”
“Ice cream!” shouted Apple Bloom.
“Beg pardon?”
The three fillies shared conspiratorial glances, and Scootaloo spoke up. “Yeah, ice cream! Hey, Applejack, have you ever thought about what the difference is between an ice cream and a milkshake?”
Applejack narrowed her eyes. For once, her developing mental defenses were holding fast. “Are y’all tryin’ to get my magic to make ice cream for ya?”
Sweetie Belle’s face lit up. “The difference,” she said slyly, “is that a mountain of ice cream stays up, but a mountain of milkshake just spills everywhere.”
Uh-oh.
For an instant, a mountain of milkshake stood in the middle of a nearby field. Then, just as Sweetie Belle had predicted, it collapsed and began to flow rapidly across the farm.
The Crusaders turned at the splattering sound emitted by the monstrous quantity of dessert behind them. Scootaloo scowled at Sweetie Belle and opened her mouth to say what would probably have been a few choice words about the tactic she had chosen before a cold, strawberry-flavored wave crashed over them all.
The scene now surrounding Applejack as she stood cannons-deep in milkshake included three shocked, shivering, sticky fillies and a freshly-flooded farm. None of this was a pleasing sight.
“Apple Bloom!” she snapped. “I said it was dangerous! I told’ja not to give my chaos magic any crazy ideas! And now look what’s happened! You’ve gone an’ flooded the farm again! You’re lucky I didn’t accidentally…” She stopped herself. “You’re lucky somethin’ worse didn’t happen!”
Apple Bloom looked at the ground resentfully. “Sweetie Belle did the mountain, not me,” she said. She turned back around, but avoided Applejack’s gaze; Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo followed suit.
“But you started it. It didn’t seem like such a bad idea, did it? But that’s just how this magic works!” Applejack kicked at the stuff covering the ground with a hind leg. “Y’ask for a little bit of ice cream to eat, and y’end up standin’ in milkshake a foot deep.” She raised a foreleg to check the actual depth and found it was closer to six inches. The point, however, remained.
“What were you thinking, Sweetie Belle?” Scootaloo finally asked.
“Uh…”
“Look, it doesn’t matter. I just hope y’all’ve learned your lesson ’bout chaos magic. All this?” Applejack gestured at the pink farm around them. “This is what happened when you tried to get ice cream. Imagine what woulda happened if…” She quickly stopped imagining. “Just don’t push your luck.” The Crusaders murmured their assent.
After a pause, Apple Bloom hesitantly spoke up. “So, this might be a bad time to ask, but… could you maybe use your magic to help us get our cutie marks?”
Applejack’s hoof met her face as uncontrollably as the milkshake mountain had appeared. “Help ya get’cher—? Bad time t’ask, huh? Yeah, you might be right about that!” She set her hoof back on the ground and looked down at Apple Bloom. “I’m not gonna help ya get your cutie marks before it’s time, not even on a good day. You’re—”
“No, no, no, Applejack.” Apple Bloom shook her head. “I don’t mean like that. I learned my lesson ’bout cheatin’ to get a cutie mark a long time ago.”
“We just want help trying new things,” said Sweetie Belle. “With your chaos magic, we can try hundreds of things a day! We’ll get our cutie marks in no time! Picture it…”
“I ain’t picturin’ anything, thank you very much. And didn’t I just tell you? Chaos magic’s dangerous. That’s why we’re havin’ this discussion standin’ in all this muck.” She looked around the farm again. “It’ll take weeks to clean normally. I guess I don’t have much choice but to use my magic to get rid of it.” With careful focus so as to avoid removing anything extra, she cleared the milkshake from the farm, revealing the green underneath. One spot of pink remained, however, and looked up indignantly. Applejack knew that natural camouflage wasn’t the only reason she hadn’t spotted Pinkie Pie already; her new way of perceiving the world was almost as strange as her new way of interacting with it.
“What about us?” Scootaloo looked back at her coat, still matted with sticky milkshake.
Applejack smirked. “I think y’all’d better go take a bath, don’t you? Run along now.” The three of them groaned and began to walk away, and Applejack turned to meet Pinkie as she bounced over.
“That strawberry milkshake was delicious! Why’d you get rid of it?”
Applejack sighed. “Maybe it reminded me a mite too much of a certain someone’s orange-flavored snow. With all these frozen treats appearin’ on the ground around here, it might be a good idea to stop growin’ apples and become dessert farmers!”
Pinkie Pie gasped. “But where will we get our apples? Where will we get our apple cider? Where will Rainbow Dash get her apple cider?” She took Applejack by the shoulders and spoke in a desperate tone. “You can’t stop making apple cider! Rainbow Dash will go crazy if she can’t get any!”
Applejack looked at the number-one cause of the Apple family’s yearly shortage of cider through half-lidded eyes. Then the last part of the sentence seemed to hit her.
“A dessert farm?” Pinkie reeled back in awe. “Oh my gosh, Applejack! That’s the best idea ever! How could you not make a dessert farm?” She twisted her head to the left. “Oh, but how could you stop growing apples?” She twisted it to the right. “But who else in Equestria could make a dessert farm?” She turned her head back and forth a few more times, then sighed. “Having all this power isn’t going to be easy, Applejack. It’ll be up to you to make hard decisions like this. Decisions that could affect the diets of gajillions of ponies!”
Applejack rolled her eyes. “Pinkie Pie—”
“Oh, wait! I know!” Her face had lit up. “You can grow caramel apples and then wash off the caramel!”
“Pinkie Pie!” Applejack raised a hoof to silence her. “Pinkie Pie, we ain’t startin’ a dessert farm.”
“Aww, but why not? Just think what we could do with all those yummy treats!” Pinkie Pie licked her chops. “We could eat them!”
“I ain’t usin’ Discord’s magic for silly things like that. It’s dangerous.” Applejack began to walk towards another likely place for the blue paint: a nearby barn where she had painted a wheelbarrow a while back. She hoped she hadn’t been the one to forget the put it away, but someone had.
As expected, Pinkie Pie followed. “Dangerous? What do you mean?”
“I haven’t quite got it under control yet. When I think about things, they just happen. It’s a wonder this conversation hasn’t triggered anythin’ crazy yet.”
“Oh! So, was that big meteor—”
“Yes, Pinkie. That was me. Don’t remind me of it unless you want it to happen again.” Applejack glanced at Pinkie Pie, who seemed strangely unconcerned. Still, she went on. “Don’t worry, though. I’ll get the hang of it soon, and then chaos magic won’t be a problem anymore.”
“And then will you make a dessert farm?”
Applejack sighed. “No, I ain’t startin’ a dessert farm. I’m perfectly happy farmin’ apples.”
“Oh. That’s too bad.” Pinkie Pie looked at Applejack curiously. “If you’re not gonna start a dessert farm, what are you gonna do with your new magic?”
“Nothin’.”
“Nothing?”
“That’s right. Nothin’.”
“What about making the whole sky a rainbow?”
Applejack stopped, screwed her eyes shut, and concentrated on absolutely nothing for a moment to keep the image from imposing itself on the world. Finally, she opened her eyes and kept walking. “Nope.”
“What about making it rain chocolate milk?”
“Nope. Especially since Discord did it.”
“What about saving Equestria?”
“Well, yeah, o’ course I’d do that. I ain’t just gonna sit around and shuffle my hooves in an emergency. But I ain’t gonna use it unless I have to. Way I see it, things were fine without chaos magic, and there’re too many risks to usin’ it. Best thing I can do with it is keep Equestria safe from it.”
Applejack pulled open the barn door and looked inside. She didn’t seem to be able to sense the things inside with the door closed, so, unlike many of Applejack’s habits, this one wasn’t completely pointless now that she had chaos magic. Not that she wouldn’t have done it anyway; she thought it would be best to pretend she was a regular Earth pony rather than become accustomed to these silly powers.
This was one of several barns the Apple family used for storing apples, and it had quite a few crates of them stacked up towards the back. Applejack could also detect, less distinctly, that the hayloft was full of hay. She could have guessed that on her own, she supposed, but it was interesting that she could “see” there at all.
There were splatters of blue paint in a nearby corner. The wheelbarrow had since been moved out of the barn—and apparently, the paint bucket, as well. Applejack shut the door.
“Well, shoot. Guess I’ll have to go to town and buy s’more.” She turned towards the farmhouse, where she could find some money to pay with.
“Some more what?” Pinkie Pie turned around and continued to follow alongside her.
“Blue paint. I’ll be needin’ some to paint the chicken coop.”
Pinkie frowned slightly. “So, you’re really not using your magic for anything but big, fate-of-Equestria emergencies? Not even teeny-tiny, itty-bitty, little things like painting a chicken coop?”
“Maybe not ‘fate-of-Equestria’. Fate-o’-my friends, fate-o’-my kin… fate-o’-myself. But yeah, just really important things like that.”
“Not even things like… throwing a party?” She smiled again. “Parties aren’t very dangerous, right?”
Applejack laughed. “No, Pinkie, they’re not very dangerous. For someone like me, they’re very, very dangerous.” She shook her head. “Shucks, that’d be some party, though.”
“Yeah, I know. There’d be dancing on the ceiling and—”
“Hush! Don’t make me think about it or I might accidentally make it happen.”
“Oh.” She looked disappointed. “Right. Sorry. Well, don’t worry! Even without chaos magic, the ‘Whoopee! We Defeated Discord Again and Applejack Has His Powers’ Party, or WWDDAAHHPP for short, is going to be a blast! Everypony’s invited! It’ll be right in the middle of Ponyville, and there will be… Well, there were going to be lots of things, but I guess I’ll have to make new plans now. But that’s fine, if you don’t want to use your… Applejack?” Applejack had stopped and was looking at her regretfully. “Is something wrong?”
“Sorry, Pinkie.” She started walking again. “I don’t think I’ll be able to go at all.”
Pinkie Pie didn’t follow. Applejack stopped again and turned around to meet her uncomprehending gaze. “But I haven’t even told you when it is,” said Pinkie.
Applejack sighed. “I’m really sorry, Pinkie. I’d love to go, I really would, but there’s no way I could go to a party without triggerin’ some huge disaster, and with all those ponies around, it’d be even worse.” Pinkie Pie’s eyes widened. “Hey, don’t worry,” Applejack quickly added, glancing nervously at Pinkie’s curls. “It ain’t a permanent thing, just till I’m fully in control of my magic. Then I can to go to your parties again.”
Pinkie Pie relaxed. “Oh, okay. Well, I guess you’ve got a good reason not to go. The guest of honor will be missing, and so will the chaos magic, but it’ll be a fun party anyway. I’m sure Mr. and Mrs. Cake will let me host it at Sugarcube Corner. Good thing I haven’t sent the invitations yet! I’ll have to make new ones. Seeya later, Applegator!” She trotted off, giggling at her own pun.
“Seeya, Pinkie.” Applejack turned around again and continued towards the farmhouse.
She felt bad about disappointing Pinkie. It just didn’t feel right to spoil her plans when they were all about spreading joy and having fun—and they always were.
She only spent a moment in the farmhouse to pick up her saddlebags and sling them around her barrel. A jingle was sufficient to confirm that it contained enough bits; paint was an inexpensive commodity.
It didn’t help that Pinkie acted so cheerful about it, Applejack thought as she walked towards the farm’s entrance. She didn’t have a reputation for hiding her feelings, of course… but she had come to the farm expecting to throw a big, chaos magic-fueled party the likes of which had never been seen before, and in the span of minutes, she’d lost even the hope of Applejack attending. With Pinkie Pie, it was hard to be sure, but Applejack didn’t quite believe that even the peppiest, pinkest party pony she knew could just shrug something like that off.
She noticed that the cloud she was staring at had taken the shape of a frowning mare’s head with a remarkably straight mane. It immediately dissipated as if embarrassed to be seen, and Applejack hoped it hadn’t been. Pinkie Pie was perfectly fine. It was silly to worry about her, and it was even sillier to broadcast those worries onto the sky.
More importantly, Applejack reminded herself, she had to get to town and buy a bucket of paint without destroying Ponyville. She passed through the gate to Sweet Apple Acres and set off down the path.
* * *
News spread fast in Ponyville. When Applejack walked through town less than an hour ago, it had been as if nothing was amiss. Ponies had gone about their business, had friendly conversations, tended their gardens, and paid Applejack no more mind than anyone else passing by. When she came by now, ponies slowed down a bit, paused in their conversations, and stared at her. Some tried to be polite or discreet, acting mostly normal and giving her passing glances, while others expressed their curiosity or wariness more openly. Not many approached her directly, but one colt did ask her if she was the new Discord. She replied that, no, she was not the new Discord and asked if he even remembered the last time Discord came to Ponyville, because last time the town hall had been floating upside-down in the sky, and did he see any upside-down town halls? He said yes, and she quickly put the town hall back down and hurried on her way.
The whole situation was rather irritating. She had lived in this town her whole life. Ponies knew who she was; it wasn’t like they’d never seen her before. And the ones who turned a wary eye to her, who herded their children in the opposite direction when she came into view, began to downright offend her after a time. Just because she had new powers didn’t mean she was going to suddenly turn evil. In fact, she was trying to keep Discord’s magic locked down, like any reasonable, safety-concerned pony would—it was rude to assume otherwise.
She entered Fresh Coat’s paint shop feeling resentful. When he heard the jingle and looked up from his magazine, he rather conspicuously narrowed his eyes at her, which didn’t help.
“Applejack,” said the gruff, orange stallion, closing the magazine and pushing it off to the side. “What’re you doing here?”
Applejack couldn’t help but roll her eyes. “I’m here to buy some paint, Fresh Coat. That’s what’cha sell here, ain’t it?”
He raised an eyebrow skeptically. “But you’re Discord.”
Applejack closed her eyes. “I most definitely am not,” she said through clenched teeth.
“You’re the new Discord.” He corrected himself. “If you need paint, can’t you just make it appear out of thin air? Snap your fingers?”
Applejack raised a hoof. “Can’t snap my fingers if I ain’t got any,” she said sardonically. “So I can’t use Discord’s magic. A real shame, innit?”
“Nice try,” said Fresh Coat, “but everyone knows that meteor storm earlier was you. And besides, you do have fingers.” He gestured at Applejack’s prehensile lion paw, whose lack of fingers she had been demonstrating a moment ago when it was a hoof.
She set it back on the ground, and it reverted to its normal form. “Fine, you’re right. I could just make some paint appear outta thin air.” Already did, as a matter of fact. “But I ain’t gonna. Chaos magic ain’t a toy. I’m gonna keep it hidden when I don’t need it, ’cause otherwise I’ll just end up destroyin’ the world. So… can I buy some paint?”
He raised both eyebrows this time. “You’re not usin’ your magic at all?”
“Why’re we still talkin’ ’bout this?”
He lowered his brows into their natural, angry-looking position. “Alright. What color you need?”
“Blue.”
“From the chart.” He pushed a piece of paper towards her.
It always confused Applejack that a pony as curt as Fresh Coat gave such flowery names to his paint colors. Many of the shades were nearly identical, as well. Honestly, did anyone actually care about whatever difference there was between “Cloudsdale Evening” and “Distant Foal Mountain”?
Fresh Coat interrupted her. “I thought you said you weren’t gonna use your magic.”
“What?” She looked up. “I ain’t usin’ it.”
Fresh Coat scowled at her. “If I was colorblind, I’d find a different line of work, Applejack. Change my desk back.”
Applejack looked at his desk. It took her a moment to realize what he meant, and then she laughed. “Blue wood? Gosh, it ain’t even painted.”
“Frozen Blueberry’s not a good shade for writing surfaces. It looks like a preschooler’s desk. Change it back.”
“Yeah, yeah. Hold your horses.” She wasn’t supposed to be using her magic, but she felt an obligation to clean up her own messes. The blue drained out of the desk, turning it brown again. “Sorry. I’m still gettin’ the hang o’—”
“Just don’t use your chaos magic in my shop again.”
Unbidden, a burst of rage burnt through Applejack’s body, and she stomped hard enough to crack the tile floor. “For Pete’s sake, Fresh! I was tryin’ to apologize! An’ just who do you think you are, anyway? If I wanna use my magic, how’re you gonna stop me!?” She jabbed a hoof into his chest. He winced, and she was jolted back into reality. She set her hoof back on the floor and cleared her throat awkwardly. Should she… apologize again?
Fresh Coat smoothed the fur on his chest and glared back at Applejack. “The Elements of Harmony worked on Discord. How’re you any different?”
She put her thoughts of politeness on hold and took a moment to process the magnitude of the insult. “From Discord?” she stammered.
“You’re paying for the floor. Now, get out of my shop,” he said, and opened his magazine again.
Applejack stared at him. She felt anger flowing through her veins again, the most corporeal sensation she’d had since the moment she had apparently become Discord.
No, this scene was not going to play out how he imagined it. If he thought she was just going to walk out of the shop and let him look cool after comparing her to Discord, he had another thing coming. She wanted to…
Before she knew what was happening, there was a whoosh and an alarmed grunt, and Fresh Coat was yanked upward as if by a hook around his hind fetlock, sending his magazine flying. She found her forehead pressed against his nose as she looked him straight in the eyes.
“Lemme answer your question first!”
He stared at her, eyes wide with shock.
“The first difference is… I am an Element o’ Harmony!” She pushed her face forward as she said this, causing him to swing slightly. “The Element of Honesty, to be precise! So maybe you should trust me a bit more when it comes to usin’ my new powers!”
He blinked at this. She ignored him.
“The second difference is…”
“Applejack!?”
Applejack stopped cold. She had a distinct feeling that Twilight Sparkle seeing this wasn’t good. Why was that? She was drawing a blank…
Oh. It was because…
…she was abusing her powers?
Applejack quickly released her imaginary grip on Fresh Coat, and he came crashing to the ground. The shopkeeper emitted a long groan.
Twilight ran into the building. “What are you doing, Applejack!?”
“Gosh, Twilight, I dunno! I dunno what got into me!” She looked down at Fresh Coat. “Uh…”
Twilight extended a hoof towards him. “Are you alright, Mr. Coat?”
He ignored the gesture and got up on his own. “Yes. No thanks to your friend here.” He picked up his magazine in his mouth, went back behind the desk, and set it down.
Applejack shuffled her hooves uneasily. “I’m really sorry, um, Mr. Coat. I really just…”
“Leave.”
She stopped for a moment and then turned around ashamedly.
“Hold it,” he said. “Fix the floor. Then leave.”
The cracks on the tiles receded, and Fresh Coat’s glare followed Applejack as she and Twilight Sparkle left the building, heading for Sweet Apple Acres.
Once they were out, Twilight immediately confronted Applejack. “Applejack, what was that? Why were you holding Fresh Coat upside-down?”
“I really don’t know, Twilight.” She bit her lip. “I guess I just let my anger get the better of me.”
“Okay, but you don’t normally attack ponies when you’re mad.” Applejack cringed. Attack? “What did he do, exactly?”
“Well, he… he was just bein’ rude to me about my new powers, and then he asked how I was any different from Discord. Ugh…” She shook her head. “That’s an awful reason. Maybe he was right. Maybe chaos magic is makin’ me evil.”
“He said that?”
“Well, I could tell he was thinkin’ it.” Twilight raised her eyebrows. “Oh, but not by readin’ his mind or anything! It was just obvious.”
Twilight nodded. “Well, I know you’re not evil, Applejack. If you were, you wouldn’t be this sorry about it.” She gazed thoughtfully into the distance. “We all have crazy impulses sometimes. Maybe you’re just more susceptible to them now—that would explain a lot about Discord.”
Applejack thought about it. “I reckon you’re right. See, the way these powers work is, whenever I imagine somethin’, it happens. I guess I just didn’t have time to think about it.”
Twilight’s eyes went wide with shock. “That sounds really dangerous! I can’t believe you haven’t…”
Applejack jammed a hoof against her mouth. “Shush!”
“Right. Sorry.” They kept walking. “I’m really impressed, though, Applejack. Most ponies wouldn’t get this far without, um… You know. Killing anyone. You… haven’t done that yet, have you? By accident, of course.”
Applejack focused on the path ahead. “The thought hadn’t crossed my mind.”
“Oh. I guess I shouldn’t have mentioned it to you, then. Oops.”
Applejack stayed silent, trying her best not to make something very bad happen.
“So, what were you doing at a paint shop, anyway?”
She sighed. “Buyin’ paint. What else would I be doin’? Droppin’ by for a visit?”
Twilight shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Have you met Fresh Coat?” Applejack chuckled. “Not exactly the friendliest guy in town, even to ponies without crazy magic powers. I still feel bad about roughin’ him up like that, though…”
“But why do you have to buy paint? Can’t you just make some appear by imagining it? In fact, how’d you manage not to do it accidentally?”
“Um… well, t’answer your first question, I ain’t usin’ my magic when it ain’t needed. It ain’t safe, and I reckon things were just fine without it.”
“Really?” Twilight raised her eyebrows as high as they went. “Are you sure about that, Applejack? With Discord’s powers, you could change the lives of everyone in Equestria.”
“That’s just what I’m afraid of.”
Twilight frowned at her for a moment, then sighed. “Well, if that’s what you think is best. I trust your judgement.”
They walked in silence for a while. Then a question occurred to Applejack. “What were y’all doin’ at the paint shop, Twilight?”
“That’s where Pinkie Pie said to look for you. Right after Sugarcube Corner, that is.”
Applejack chuckled. “But she didn’t tell y’all what I was doin’ there?”
“Um, well, I… I didn’t ask. I just wanted to ask you for a favor, but since you’re not using your magic… I might as well not bother you about it.” She sighed again.
Twilight sounded pretty let down. Applejack didn’t want to disappoint her, too… Perhaps her request was safe. “Maybe I can still help. What do you need?”
A small smile appeared on Twilight’s face, though it looked like she was trying not to get her hopes up. “Well, I was hoping you could help me study how chaos magic works. Ponies barely know anything about it, but we do know that, if we did, it would reveal a lot about the nature of magic in general. About the world in general! And now, for the first time, it’s in the hooves of someone who might let us study it. It’s one of the most important developments in the history of science!” She cleared her throat and calmed down a bit. “If you think it’s safe, that is.”
“Well, when you put it like that…” A smile began to spread across Twilight’s face again, and she pressed her lips together in an attempt to suppress it. “…it’s kinda hard to say no. What kinda tests do you have in mind?”
“Controlled experiments in the library.” Her steps were getting bouncy, and her voice wasn’t quite under control. “We’ll start small. I can even learn a spell to help suppress your imagination.”
“That sounds pretty safe. Sure, let’s do it.”
Twilight’s face broke into a grin, and then she jumped in the air. “Hooray!” She hit the ground again and threw herself over Applejack. “Thank you so much! This is going to be revolutionary! This is going to be the most important thing we’ve ever done!”
“Come on now, Twilight. We’ve saved Equestria, what? Four times?” Applejack found herself smiling, too, and lightly pushed Twilight away.
“Well… yes,” she admitted. “But still! This is amazing! We’re going to be learning things nopony in history has ever known before!”
“’Cept maybe Discord. Anyway, I still need to paint the chicken coop. You know where I can find some blue paint now that Fresh Coat’s kicked me out o’ the shop?”
“Well, then… I’ll go back to Fresh Coat’s and buy it for you!” Twilight said, smiling. She began to turn around.
Applejack stopped her. “Um, sorry to burst your bubble, Twilight, but he’ll know you’re just buyin’ it for me.”
Twilight shrugged. “I’ll just pay him extra! Don’t worry about it. Wait right there!” She trotted off in the direction of the paint shop.
Still feeling skeptical, Applejack went to the side of the street and sat down on a bench to wait.
It would be a problem if she was banned from Fresh Coat’s paint shop for life. There was a reason he got away with his somewhat lacking customer service: there wasn’t anywhere else in Ponyville to get paint. The Apple family owned a lot of buildings, and they needed painting. How would they get the stuff? Big McIntosh didn’t like shopping. Granny Smith or Apple Bloom could buy it… but, though she wouldn’t admit it to them, Applejack didn’t fully trust either of those two with jobs like this. She could just imagine Granny Smith… going out and…
That was odd. She couldn’t imagine Granny Smith going out and doing anything. She couldn’t imagine her at all, in fact. She knew that she was green and frail and white-haired, with a pie for a cutie mark, but she couldn’t picture her. She couldn’t picture Apple Bloom, either, or Twilight Sparkle. She tried approaching it from another angle, imagining a likeness of Apple Bloom on the ground.
She spent a few moments looking at the image. So that was what her sister looked like. But, of course, she had known that all along… It was a very odd feeling. She rubbed her hoof across the dust, and the picture was gone once again from both the street and her mind. Twilight would be interested in this.
A bucket slammed into the ground where Apple Bloom had been. “Here you go!” said Twilight cheerfully.
Applejack looked up. “Oh, hey, there, Twilight. You snuck up on me.”
“Did I?” She cocked her head. “Didn’t you hear my hoofbeats?”
Applejack shook her head.
“Interesting. That’s another thing we’ll have to examine. Anyway,” she extended her hoof towards the bucket, “here’s the paint for your chicken coop! I wasn’t sure what shade you wanted, so I chose Bluebell.”
“That’s fine.” Applejack took the handle in her mouth and tried to test the weight of the bucket before realizing her possibly-infinite strength made the attempt futile. “Thanks for gettin’ me this. How much did he make you pay?”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. It’s on me.”
“On you?” Applejack shook her head. “Thanks, Twilight, but I’m not gonna make you pay for my paint. Just tell me how much it cost and I’ll pay you back.”
“Oh.” Twilight exhaled resignedly. “You’re not going to let me do this for you, are you?”
“Nope.” Applejack twisted her head and used her mouth to open a saddlebag.
“Well, it cost… It cost nine bits.” Twilight grinned.
Applejack cocked an eyebrow. “Uh-huh.”
The corners of Twilight’s mouth slipped gradually downward.
“And how much extra did you pay him?”
Twilight sighed. “Sixteen bits.”
“Twenty-five bits for a bucket o’ paint? I musta really ruffled his feathers.” Applejack reached into her saddlebag and pulled out two pouches of ten bits each, which she gave to Twilight. She then took five bits out of another compartment and gave them to her, as well.
“Thanks,” Twilight muttered, taking the money up in her aura. She lifted a flap in her saddlebag and stored the pouches inside. With precise movements, she placed three of the five bits into another pouch and stored it alongside the others, replacing it with a new pouch containing the remaining two. “Anyway, about those experiments with your powers—I think we should start as soon as possible. I can write and set up an initial set of tests by tomorrow. I think we should start at nine in the morning. Will that work for you?”
“Seeya, Twi.” She picked up the paint bucket, and they took their separate paths, Applejack bound for Sweet Apple Acres, and Twilight, presumably, for the library.
* * *
Applejack felt satisfied as she approached the chicken coop. She had gone out and gotten a paint bucket, and it had been a lot of work, but she had done it honestly, without using her new powers. She wasn’t proud of her outburst in Fresh Coat’s shop, or of the milkshake mountain, or of anything she had done with her chaos powers so far, really, but that was exactly why she was trying her best to get Discord’s magic under control and resist the temptation to use it. So far, she seemed to be making good progress on that front.
Now she stood in front of the coop, holding in her mouth a hard-won bucket of paint, as well as a brush, which she had retrieved with much less hassle. The final leg of the journey was here. She was going to paint the chicken coop blue.
…A wave of Bluebell spread across the surface of the building, too fast for Applejack to react.
She blinked a few times. Then, with a sigh through her load-bearing teeth, she turned around. There wasn’t much point in un-painting it just so she could paint it again. She’d just have to do her next job without chaos magic.
Big McIntosh looked briefly over his shoulder at Applejack but didn’t stop pulling the plow. “Heya, AJ.”
She trotted up beside him and began to match his pace. He was going quite fast, but she hardly noticed.
“So… you’ve heard about my, uh… my new powers, huh?”
“Ee-yup. Chaos magic.” He glanced down at her, smiling. “Not bad. Granny don’t much like the idea, though.”
Applejack nodded. “Yeah… Chaos magic is chaos magic, you know.”
He looked down at her again with mild surprise. “Ee-yup,” he replied. He reached the end of the field and began to tug the plow in a circle, beginning another furrow. “Somethin’ wrong with that?”
Applejack gave him a curious look. “Well… kinda. I ain’t sure I can control this kinda power is all. I ain’t even sure Discord could control it.”
Big McIntosh chuckled. “Yup. Fair ’nough.”
They walked in silence for a moment, Applejack deep in thought, Big McIntosh moving steadily down the furrow.
“Hey, Big Mac?”
“Ee-yup?”
“I was wonderin’…”
Applejack trailed off. Big McIntosh plodded along patiently.
Then, unexpectedly, he slowed to a halt and cocked an ear. “…Is someone callin’ your name?”
“Huh?” Applejack snapped out of her reverie. She listened—or did something a lot like listening, anyway.
“Applejack!”
She zeroed in on the source of the voice near the freshly “painted” chicken coop just in time for it to disappear in a purple flash.
“Applejack!” came the call, this time near the farmhouse.
“Shucks, it’s Twilight. Wonder what she…” Applejack looked over to see her brother several yards away, continuing down the furrow. “Big Mac?”
He glanced up. “Go ahead. Twilight looks like she’s in some kinda hurry.”
“Right…” She turned away and set off at a gallop. “Twilight! Stay still! I’m right here!”
“Applejack?” Twilight called from the barn.
There was another purple flash, and suddenly Applejack was bowling her over.
“Applejack, I… I forgot to tell you something!” said Twilight breathlessly. With yet another purple flash, she was back on her feet. “The Princesses want to see you!” She nudged Applejack. “Get up!”
“All of them?” Applejack tried to recall the complex motions a normal pony went through to stand up after falling over. “Right now?”
“Princess Celestia and Princess Luna, and yes, right now!” Twilight trotted in place anxiously. “Oh, I’m so sorry I forgot to mention it before! And you’re not using your chaos magic! You’re going to be so late!”
“Hold your horses, Twilight. Are we talkin’ ‘right now’ right now, or ‘in a few minutes’ right now?”
“We’re talking ‘the last train to Canterlot leaves in ten minutes, four hours late is better than a whole day’ right now!” Twilight looked towards the sun just over the horizon. “They wanted to see you at sunset, but that’s obviously not going to happen. Oh, this is all my fault! Do you have any idea how busy the Princesses’ schedules are?”
“Busy enough to spend Nightmare Night in Ponyville?”
Twilight groaned. “You’re missing the point, Applejack! Get to the train station! Now!”
“Alright, I’m—”
“Wait! Wait! Bring these!” Using her magic, Twilight hefted a large blue chest which Applejack probably should have noticed earlier. “The Elements. They wanted you to bring them. Princess Celestia said it was important.”
Applejack looked the chest over. Significant parts of it seemed to be made of gold. “That’ll weigh me down.”
“You could probably run with this if you really tried! Just use a little suspension of disbelief. It’ll be fine! Here!” With a possibly justified disregard for safety, she heaved the box in Applejack’s direction.
Applejack knelt slightly as she caught it on her back. It swayed slightly but kept its balance. “I dunno, Twilight,” she said nervously. “I ain’t so sure I want to believe in this.”
“Sorry, Applejack, it’s the only way! Now get a move on!”
“Alright, alright.” Applejack set off at an effortless canter, and Twilight followed anxiously. “You warned ’em I’d be late, right?”
Twilight’s hoof made violent contact with her forehead as she came to a screeching halt. “Augh! What is wrong with me today?! I haven’t been this disorganized about a meeting with royalty since… since…” She shook her head and took a deep breath. “No, no… It’s just a… relatively informal meeting. It could be worse. You get to the train station, and I’ll go tell Spike to send the Princesses a letter.”
Applejack nodded. Twilight turned and darted away with surprising speed.
…Before coming to an even more surprising stop several feet away.
In mid-air.
Just like that. With no warning and for no apparent reason at all, Twilight Sparkle was suspended mid-stride, inches above the ground. There may have been a sound like breaking glass as it happened, but then again, Applejack may have imagined it. It was hard to tell the difference sometimes.
Slowly, Applejack walked up to her and looked her up and down. She seemed quite oblivious to the fact that she was frozen in time.
Applejack let out a defeated sigh. “What did I do this time?”
Twilight didn’t answer.
Applejack looked at the sun. She wasn’t entirely sure, but it didn’t seem to be getting any closer to the horizon.
“Whoa, Nelly…” She turned back to Twilight. “Twilight! Move!” She willed her to move.
Twilight didn’t move. She couldn’t quite imagine what Twilight would look like in motion.
Applejack waved a hoof in front of Twilight’s face. Then she smacked it into Twilight’s face. Twilight didn’t budge.
“Maybe I don’t have to worry about bein’ late to meet the Princesses after all…” she murmured nervously.
She raced off at a gallop anyway.
* * *
It was worse in town.
It was sunset. Ponyville was still active, ponies trotting about to attend to business in their own ways and their own places. Some relaxed on benches, others sat down to eat dinner. It was one of the most active times of day, in fact, but it was beginning to wind down.
It was beginning to wind down very slowly. Imperceptibly slowly. Actually, it probably wasn’t winding down at all.
There wasn’t much to wind down from, at any rate. Everything, everyone, wherever Applejack went, was still as death. No, more than that. Still as if they’d never been alive.
That rare kind of silence filled the air, the kind that makes the world feel vast, open, and empty. When she thought about it, Applejack could hear her own hoofbeats, but that only served to underscore the feeling of being alone.
She wandered up to a mint green unicorn who had been trotting past the fountain. She was vaguely familiar. Her cutie mark was… a lyre. Of course, Lyra Heartstrings, that’s who it was.
Lyra looked like she was having a good day. She was carrying a little paper bag with a purple heart on it, and Applejack thought she could see a bit of a spring in her step.
Applejack raised a hoof and, knowing full well what would happen, gave the bag a solid tap. It didn’t seem to notice.
Concentrating her chaos powers, she tried to pull it from Lyra’s grip. She tried to turn the town hall upside down. She tried to summon a tentacled monstrosity out of thin air.
She was completely and utterly powerless. This did mean that she didn’t have to worry about accidentally destroying the world anymore, but that was hardly reassuring now that the damage seemed to be done anyway.
Actually, she wasn’t completely powerless. She could move her own body, obviously, but there was one other thing she could affect: the chest containing the Elements of Harmony. This may have just been because she was carrying it when time stopped, but she wouldn’t have been surprised if the artifacts that had defeated Discord twice simply weren’t affected by what she assumed to be a bout of accidental chaos magic.
Speaking of things chaos magic had no effect on, Princess Celestia’s anti-Discord ward on the Elements was clearly still working. Applejack couldn’t open that chest for the life of her. It was more responsive than anything else around, just enough for the latches to jiggle infuriatingly, but it was locked tight. She couldn’t open it, blow it up, or transform it into an easier-to-open container. Finding a way to use her own Element of Harmony against herself wasn’t going to work.
Now she was just carrying the thing with her. She’d given up on trying to pretend she was a normal pony who just happened to be able to carry a huge chest like it was nothing and settled for floating it along a few feet behind her.
As she wandered through this particularly lifelike statue garden, alone with the ultimate symbols of safety and unity in Equestria, she couldn’t shake the feeling that they were judging her.
You stupid pony, they seemed to say. You thought you could control chaos magic? You don’t even understand it. “If anypony can keep a lid on Discord’s magic, it’s me,” you said. Ha! Maybe you should be the Element of Ego.
“Shut up,” Applejack muttered. “Rainbow Dash would be the Element of Ego, and you know it.”
Well, she can’t be the Element of Ego if she’s frozen in time, can she?
“Ugh,” Applejack grunted. “Why is everything frozen in time? That’s what I wanna know. I didn’t do anything. I don’t think I even thought anything!”
Exactly. You don’t understand chaos magic at all. And yet you tried to—
“I tried to what?” She rounded on the inanimate object. “Honestly, it’s only been a few hours, and I didn’t even do anything. What could I have done better? I’m listenin’.”
You could have… If you hadn’t been so prideful, you would have… Uh…
“Exactly,” she muttered, continuing down the street. “None o’ this is my fault.”
Well, you still feel like it is. So there.
Applejack couldn’t think of a response to that.
After wandering around town a bit longer, she began talking to herself in earnest. She started by stating the obvious.
“Well, all this wanderin’ around town ain’t doin’ anyone any good.”
She wandered around town some more.
Then it hit her. She looked up at Canterlot in the distance.
“The Princesses!” She pulled the chest up beside her. “C’mon! I dunno how, but if anypony can help me…”
She sighed.
“Shucks… I guess they’ll just be frozen in time like everyone else, but…”
Before she could think about it any more, she leaned back on her haunches and kicked off, leaving the ground behind for Canterlot.
* * *
The journey was predictably uneventful. Green hills and occasional wooded patches rolled below her, and a few times she spotted a motionless bird, which would have been amusing under other circumstances. Once she arrived in Canterlot, finding it to be a lot like Ponyville in that, to put it mildly, there wasn’t much going on, and entered the castle, the search for the Princesses proved to be only slightly more interesting. She got lost for a few minutes and came across Prince Blueblood reading a comic book in a particularly out-of-the-way corridor. A special edition of Power Ponies, it seemed, focusing on a character called “Zapp”. He was really engrossed in it; Applejack couldn’t even read over his shoulder with his snout so close to the pages.
The initial shock of finding out that she had seemingly broken the world had worn off some time ago, but there was still a nervous energy nagging at her. She passed a guard, wishing yet again that she could just ask him where the royal sisters were, and stepped through the solid oak of the door he was guarding. She took a look around…
“Yes! There you two are!” She tugged the chest through the door and approached the wide balcony where the Princesses were standing.
The room between the door and the balcony seemed to be a small library of some kind—a personal library, perhaps. The Princesses were facing away from the door, probably not expecting Applejack to come in unannounced.
There was a small table in the center of the room, even more ornate than what one would expect to find in Canterlot Castle and certainly not in the same style. It was round and made of rough, dark stone, with six huge gems of different colors embedded in its surface. Complex, deep-cut engravings filled the space between them. Even in the limbo of stopped time, they seemed to emanate a power as old as the rock they were cut from.
Taking all this in but not paying it much thought, Applejack chucked the Elements of Harmony onto the table.
WHOOOOOSH
A wave of searing white energy exploded from the chest as it sprung open, and the gems in the table came to life, glowing brightly. There was also a colorful glow coming from inside the chest, presumably from the Elements, but Applejack couldn’t see for certain because she’d happened to set it down facing away from her.
The Princesses spun around.
White, shimmering light cloaked the edges of the room, and… wait.
The Princesses spun around?
Applejack started. “You… you moved!”
They glanced at each other. Princess Luna spoke first. “Hmm. This is certainly unexpected.”
“Yes…” Princess Celestia walked up to the table. “Have you been wandering around with time stopped?” she asked with concern. “I’m sorry. We weren’t expecting this for another four hours. I thought this meeting time would be early enough.”
“You… know about that?” Applejack cocked an eyebrow curiously at her. “I reckon I was out there for about an hour. I was worried I’d never get the world started again.”
Princess Luna took up her position by her sister’s side. “Don’t worry, Applejack. It’s a perfectly normal side effect. Outside of this room, the world remains frozen. When you set the chest upon the table, we were brought into the elements’ time stream.” She set a hoof on the stone table, tracing one of the many curves cut into its surface. “You’re lucky you thought to come here so quickly.”
“So… it wasn’t me?”
The Princesses shook their heads. Applejack let out a sigh of relief.
“Thank goodness. I had no idea what it was I did! I thought chaos magic was just more dangerous than I thought.”
“No,” said Princess Celestia firmly. “Chaos magic is very difficult to tame, but it is not a form of magic that will betray you. Chaos keeps no secrets; you will always know why it does what it does, even if it isn’t quite what you wanted.” She looked in the chest. “The truth is, the Elements of Harmony may be more dangerous. They have a mind of their own.” She lifted the blue box in her magic aura and turned it to face Applejack. “This is why they decided to stop time.”
Resting on pink velvet inside the chest were five necklaces and a crown, each set with a powerful magic gem in the shape of its bearer’s cutie mark.
Except for one.
The Element of Honesty lay broken into orange shards, scattered on the surface of the fabric.
“Aw, shoot,” Applejack murmured.
“You cannot control both chaos magic and an Element of Harmony,” said Princess Luna. “But there must always be exactly six Elements. They have brought us to a time outside of time so that you may decide who the next bearer of the Element of Honesty will be.”
“Me? They can’t decide on their own like they did for the six of us?”
Princess Celestia shook her head. “The Elements of Harmony are a form of destiny magic. With their power over both the past and the future, they are meant to pass naturally from one bearer to the next as the millennia go by.”
“But today, destiny was thwarted. You, Applejack, lost control of your Element before it was time. And now, uncertain, they turn to the Element of Honesty’s former bearer for guidance. It is up to you to decide what happens next.” She looked solemnly at Applejack. “It is up to you to decide fate.”
Applejack looked down at the Elements inside the chest. “Well, ain’t this day just full o’ surprises…” she mused.
“Indeed,” Princess Luna agreed. “Today, the future of Equestria is being rewritten. There hasn’t been an upset of magical forces on this scale in so long that… that I was there to see the last one.”
Applejack nodded slowly. “Alright, so…” She waved a hoof in the air. “How do I appoint the new Element of Honesty, then? What do I do once I’ve made my pick?”
Princess Celestia raised her eyebrows. “Do you have someone in mind?”
“No idea. I just wanna be prepared is all.”
The Princess nodded. “Alright. When you have made your decision, we will bring what remains of the Element of Honesty out of this room to the pony you have chosen. If they choose to accept the responsibility, we will put it around their neck. Their destiny will be bound to the Elements and to the other bearers forever.”
“I do not think I need to warn you of this, Applejack, but do not take this decision lightly,” said Princess Luna. “You must choose someone who not only epitomizes honesty, but who will be able to form strong, lasting bonds with the other bearers, who will be able to wield their Element against evil and save Equestria time and time again, as you have.”
“You have all the time in the world to make this decision,” added Princess Celestia.
Applejack nodded. Without really thinking about what she was doing, she lifted the Element of Honesty’s gold necklace from the chest with her magic and began to turn it around.
Who could take her place as the Element’s bearer? Apple Bloom… she was fairly valorous, but she wasn’t exactly the perfect example of an honest pony. The same went for the other Crusaders and for Spike. They were all a bit young anyway.
Big Mac? Someone so quiet would certainly make an unusual choice for Element of Honesty. Maybe there was a certain logic to it… Then again, maybe there wasn’t.
She glanced up at the Princesses… No, that was ridiculous.
She was just going over her options. She had all the time in the world.
She chuckled quietly. As long as she was considering absurd possibilities… She couldn’t help but picture it as she held the necklace aloft.
ZAP.
Applejack’s jaw dropped as a figure appeared in front of her, bathed in a bright white glow, the remaining part of the Element of Honesty suddenly fastened around its neck. One by one, colored spotlights erupted from the remaining Elements, emitting a loud hum and pointing at the empty spot in the necklace’s center.
“Applejack!” yelled Princess Luna over the noise. “What are you doing? How can you have chosen so quickly?!”
Applejack’s jaw flapped up and down wordlessly as she stared wide-eyed at the horrible mistake that was coming into being before her. “NO!” she shouted. “NO NO NO NO NO NO—”
With an earsplitting CRACK, all three of them were thrown back from the newly christened bearer of the Element of Honesty as he sank slowly to the floor, stretching and yawning, wearing the newly reconstituted gem around his neck.
“Ohhhh, yes!” Discord the pony sat up and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “Now that’s what I call a wake-up call.” He smiled pleasantly at the gaping figures around him. “Oh, hello. What’s wrong? Something I should know about?”
He looked around. The three most powerful ponies in Equestria stared back at him.
He stretched a hoof in front of him and examined it. “Well, would you look at that…” he remarked, turning it around a few times. “I’m a pony. Okay, you three, seriously. What just happened?” He pointed at Applejack. “And why’s the orange one here and not any of the others?” He reclined on the floor and looked expectantly at the Princesses.
They looked slowly from him to Applejack and back again.
Princess Celestia, with characteristic patience and seriousness, had explained the outcome of his wager at the farm and the hours since then. And the more she said, the more sour his face became. He wasn’t exactly screaming with rage, but he at least looked thoroughly inconvenienced.
“Is that all?” he asked at last. “Are you done this time? Or are you going to tell me fate has ordained that I have to become Twilight Sparkle’s butler now?”
The Princess actually smiled at this. She shook her head. “No, Discord. If you wanted that job, you should have applied when you were still part dragon.”
“Oh, ha, ha. Princess Sunny Butt cracks a joke. Forgive me, Your Highness, I can’t kiss your fancy golden slippers because I’m laughing too hard!” He threw his hooves in the air, then slumped against the mysterious stone table. “Element of Honesty? I have to make friends with…” He gestured at Applejack. “…with all of her friends? Princess, if you wanted to punish me, you should have come up with this millennia ago. To be perfectly honest—because apparently that’s my specialty now—the stone prison was completely unoriginal.”
“I never intended to punish you, Discord, only to keep your powers in check.”
“Yes, yes, I know. The noble and merciful Princess wants what’s best for everyone, even evil maniacs like Discord.” He snorted. “If I didn’t know how sickeningly boring you are, I wouldn’t recommend ways to punish me. I may be an evil maniac, but I’m not an idiot.”
Princess Celestia shook her head. “Discord…”
He sighed and rested his chin on the table resignedly. “Here it comes.”
She gave him a disapproving look, then continued. “Discord, I brought you to Ponyville because I believed that you had it in you to use your powers for good instead of evil. Your powers may have changed since then, but my belief hasn’t. You may not think you’re interested in making friends. You may not think the well-being of other ponies concerns you. But Discord…” She walked forward and leaned down, smiling at him. He scowled back. “You may not know yourself as well as you think.” She straightened up. “Go back to Ponyville. See if you can’t make the ponies there like you.” She winked. “You’ll enjoy it.”
Princess Luna approached as well. Discord had to bend his head back to look at the two of them. “You have most likely realized by now that you don’t have a choice in the matter,” she said.
“No, I suppose not.” He shrugged. “Fine, I’ll do it. I’ll become best friends with every pony in Equestria. I’ll forgive them for being boring and annoying, they’ll forgive me for trying to spice things up a bit around here, and our camaraderie will light up the sky with magical rainbows of pure harmonic power.” His signature smug smile crept back onto his face. “But I won’t like it.”
Princess Luna closed her eyes and sighed. Princess Celestia, however, looked satisfied. “Thank you, Discord. We can’t ask any more of you than to try. Now…” She looked over her shoulder. “There’s one more pony here who may need some time to get used to a new situation.”
All eyes turned to Applejack, who flinched at the sudden attention. “I’m really sorry about all this,” she muttered.
Princess Celestia shook her head. “It’s not your fault, Applejack.”
“It actually is,” said Discord, eliciting glares from both princesses. He scoffed. “Well, it is. You may not think it, but being a chaos magician takes discipline, which my replacement here obviously doesn’t have.”
Applejack nodded reluctantly. “It’s true. I try, I really do, but this magic just gets outta my control sometimes. Whatever I think of just happens. How am I supposed to control that? We’re lucky I haven’t ended the world yet.”
He frowned suspiciously back at her. “I don’t like the look of that smile. What are you thinking?”
“Applejack has only had these new powers for a day. What she lacks is experience.” She raised her eyebrows meaningfully. “And a good teacher.”
Applejack’s jaw dropped. “A… good teacher?”
Discord shook his head scornfully. “Princess, you may know about teaching, but chaos is an art, and you don’t know the first thing about it.” He crossed his forelegs. “Only I do.”
Princess Celestia’s smile only grew more foreboding.
Discord’s haughty expression slowly gave way to uncertainty, then comprehension. He pointed at himself disbelievingly. “You want me to…?” He paused for a moment, then burst out laughing. “Oh, Princess, you really are something! That’s a terrible idea! Of course I’ll do it.”
Applejack and Luna turned to look at her. “Thank you, Discord,” she said simply.
He grinned. “No problem at all, Your Highness.”
She glanced at Princess Luna, who seemed unhappy but kept quiet. “Now I suggest you both take the next train back to Ponyville. It’s time for my sister and me to bring the day to an end.”
“What?” asked Applejack, startled. “Is that it? You don’t even have any sage advice about how to handle bein’ the most powerful pony in Equestria?”
Discord laughed. “You don’t know the Head Honcho Princess very well, do you? I think you’ll find that she has a non-interventionist or, to use the scientific term, ‘lazy’ policy when it comes to these things.”
Princess Celestia chuckled and shook her head. “Giving sage advice is your job now, Discord. I expect you both to keep me informed about how lessons are going. But if you have any questions, feel free to ask me anything at any time.”
Of course Applejack had questions.
She… just couldn’t think of any.
After searching for a few moments, it occurred to her that there was one thing she was genuinely curious about. She walked forward and set her hoof on the stone pedestal. “What’s the story behind this here table?” she asked.
The Princess’s smile faded. “I wish I knew. The Elements of Harmony can be unpredictable and inconsistent. As far as I know, this artifact didn’t exist until today.”
“You shouldn’t trust those things,” Discord commented. He put a foreleg around Applejack’s shoulder and steered her towards the door. “Well, new friend slash student, let’s be off. We don’t want to miss the next train to Ponyville! Whenever it comes.”
“Right…” She looked back at the princesses. “So long, I guess. I’ll write to let you know how things are goin’.” I hope you know what you’re doing, she thought.
Discord shut the door behind them and turned a pleasant smile to Applejack as they walked down the hallway. “You said that last part out loud,” he said. “In case you didn’t know.”
* * *
Discord swung the door open with all his might.
“Stop doin’ that, Discord. You hit that poor fella in the face last time.” Applejack gestured towards a dapper but bruised-looking gentlecolt glaring at Discord from the car behind them.
“Oh, don’t worry so much, Applejack. What are the chances of something like that happening twice?” He gave the next car a good look around. “Ah, finally!” He dragged Applejack through the door and closed it. “Look! A car all to ourselves! Now I can divulge all of the deepest secrets of chaos to you without fear.”
Applejack looked around the car as well. It was empty. She didn’t know what else she’d expected. “So that’s why you didn’t wanna stop in any o’ the other cars. I thought you were just the type who doesn’t like sittin’ next to strangers.”
“Who, me? Perhaps you’ve already forgotten who you’re talking to! I made all of Equestria my canvas, several times! I am most certainly not shy.” He flopped down in a random seat and gestured towards the spot across the table from him. Applejack took it.
“I do wonder, though—and I’m telling you this because you’re my friend now and friends talk to each other about pointless things—why there are so many ponies taking the train to Ponyville in the middle of the night. Has it suddenly become a popular tourist destination? Because of me, perhaps?”
Applejack rolled her eyes. “Most of ’em are probably gettin’ off at other stops.”
“Oh. Yes.” Discord cleared his throat. “Yes, well, I knew that. What, did you think I didn’t know that trains have multiple stops?”
She shrugged. “You’ve been trapped in stone for most of a few thousand years.”
“They had trains back then. Oh, yes, I remember them… They were so much fun to tie in knots.” He chuckled and pressed his hooves together. “And that is exactly what I’m going to teach you! Won’t it be fun? I have quite the curriculum planned, you know! On day one, I’ll introduce you to the concept of ‘schadenfreude’. It’s not as critical as the joy of pure chaos, but it’s much easier to master.”
“You know that’s not what the Princesses had in mind, Discord. All I want is for you to teach me how not to use my magic.”
Discord sighed. “How boring. Well, Applejack, suppose I did decide to teach you how to use chaos magic ‘by the book’, as if that made any sense. Keeping it suppressed may be what you’re struggling with now, but you’ll find later on that getting it to do what you want is even harder. So obviously our lessons wouldn’t begin and end with not using it.”
“Except what I want it to do is nothin’.”
Discord squinted at her. “And what, pray tell, does that mean, exactly?”
Applejack looked firmly back at him. “It means no more chaos magic. Ever again. I’m in charge of it, it’s my job to keep Equestria safe from it.”
His eyes slowly widened until they looked like they were going to pop out of his skull. “Do you have any idea what you are saying?” he asked through clenched teeth.
“Chaos magic may be important to you, Discord, but we don’t need it. Equestria gets on just fine without crazy, dangerous magic powerin’ everything.”
He let out a curt laugh and leaned back in disbelief. “What Equestria are you living in? Look out the window, Applejack. We are, at this very moment, riding on a magic-powered train traveling at 80 miles per hour! Is that not dangerous? What if somepony’s on the tracks?”
“Alright, maybe we do have some dangerous magic. But that don’t mean we need to add more.”
Discord held his head in his hooves and groaned. “This is the pony I’m supposed to be teaching?” He leaned against the table and pointed at Applejack. “Applejack, I don’t normally mind what ponies think. But you are insulting everything I care about. I didn’t even know I cared about anything, but I suppose I must, because you’re insulting all of it.”
Applejack crossed her forelegs. “Yeah… that ain’t exactly discouraging.”
“Thank you, Applejack. You’re a real pal. Look, just… If you’d just think about what I’m saying here for a moment. You have nearly infinite power at your disposal. There have to be some uses for it which are not evil.” He spread his hooves in an I don’t know what else to say kind of gesture. “Are you getting this?”
“I’m gettin’ ya. But just because I can do somethin’ some way don’t mean I should. Best laid plans o’ mice and mares and all that.” She shook her head. “There are some uses for murder that ain’t evil. But as long as there’s another way, I don’t think even you would resort to that.”
“Those are not the same—” He stopped. Rolling his eyes, he waved a hoof dismissively. “You know what, fine. If you’re not going to do what’s best for Equestria, that’s none of my concern. I don’t care about Equestria. I don’t even know what I’m arguing with you for.”
“And if you don’t respect my decisions, that’s fine by me.”
“Fine by me, too.”
They glared at each other across the table.
Discord’s face lit up. “Oh, Applejack? I was going to ask you something.”
“Yeah?”
“Can I have some money?”
Applejack looked at him through half-lidded eyes.
“Ponies need to eat food, right? I don’t really have any, you see.”
She let out a long sigh. “Discord… I’m a farmer. If you need food, you can ask me for food, not money.”
“Alright,” he said cheerfully. “Can I have some food?”
Applejack shrugged. “Fine, I guess.”
“Excellent! I’ve never really eaten food before. I wonder what it tastes like. Now!” He rubbed his hooves together. “Since that’s settled, I have a very important book I would like to share with you.” He pulled a thick, dusty old tome from somewhere or other and let it fall to the table with a thud that made Applejack instinctively check whether the surface was still level.
“Where’d that come from?”
Discord leafed through the pages, smiling. “I bought it while you weren’t looking.”
“How’d you buy it without any money?” asked Applejack suspiciously.
He shrugged. “Beats me. I don’t concern myself with such things. Ah! Here’s the first page.” He tilted the book towards himself and cleared his throat. “Knock knock.”
Applejack gave him her most unamused look.
Discord grinned expectantly. “This is the part where you ask who’s there,” he explained.
“I know.”
He shook his head in mock disappointment. “Oh, come now, Applejack. How am I supposed to practice being a better friend if you won’t even let me entertain you with knock-knock jokes?”
“I don’t much care for knock-knock jokes.”
“Well, I do. Maybe you need to practice being a better friend.” He cleared his throat again and knocked on the table. “Knock knock.”
“Who’s there.”
Discord chuckled. “Dishes.”
“Dishes who,” said Applejack reluctantly.
“Dishes…” He shook with restrained laughter. “Dishes…”
She watched as he set the book down and laughed into his hoof.
“I… I don’t know if I can get it out…” He wiped a tear from his eye and picked the book back up. “Okay, here goes. Dishes…” He took a deep breath. “…a really bad joke.” He bit his lip and looked up at Applejack.
Applejack looked back.
Discord burst out into uproarious laughter. “Ahahahahaha! Oh ho ho ho ho ho ho! Priceless! Simply marvelous!” He pounded the table. “I think I may be beginning to see your side of things, Applejack. Who needs chaos magic for entertainment when you have knock-knock jokes?” He picked the book up. “Well, let’s get down to business. There are who knows how many thousands of jokes in here, and we only have four hours to get through them all.”
Applejack propped her face up on her hoof and looked out the window at the dark countryside rolling by. “Thanks a lot, Princess,” she muttered.
Somewhere between Canterlot and Ponyville, two figures took a low, level path through the hills, following the train tracks. The sun had been up for what was probably less than an hour, though they had been walking for much longer, as at least one of them was acutely aware.
“Applejack…” Discord gasped, staggering to keep up with her. “Applejack, if Ponyville isn’t… huff around this next bend, I…”
He hadn’t been able to finish that sentence for the past several bends.
Applejack rolled her eyes. “It’s your fault we can’t take the train, Discord.”
“Oh, huff sure… It’s my fault that you… huff… tied it into a… a pretzel. All Discord’s fault… huff…”
“Yes, Discord, it is all your fault. You coaxed me into it! You were goin’ on about how you have to lift both ends, and then you gotta bend the cars a bit to make a tight enough loop and all that. You were obviously tryin’ to get me to picture it in my head.” She shook her head. “I thought this was obvious, but you can’t just do whatever you want and then get mad when ponies try to blame you for it. You deserve this.”
“It was a test. A… huff… a test! It’s not my huff fault you failed! I’m supposed to be teaching you… huff right? Huff… Besides… you fixed it, didn’t you? We could’ve… huff…”
“For the last time, Discord, we can’t ride on trains. It just ain’t safe. We’re lucky nopony was hurt last night.”
“Hmm… Yes…” He tried to chuckle, but it came out more like a cough. “I do… huff… I do applaud your technique, you know… bending space… huff… Managed to keep gravity… huff facing down in every car. You have promise, Applejack.”
Applejack looked over her shoulder. Discord was stumbling along several yards behind her. “Hey! Catch up!” she called.
He groaned. “Slow down… I haven’t… exercised in… huff… ten billion years.”
She sped up slightly. “That how old you are?”
“That’s what… huff… scientists seem to think…” He grimaced helplessly after her. “Oh, Applejack, please stop… Huff… huff… We’ve been walking… huff for hours… huff There’s no water… huff… I’m… huff about to keel over…”
“Stop your bellyachin’. You’ve been sayin’ that for hours.”
With a pitiful moan, he keeled over.
Applejack snorted and continued walking. “Lie there as long as you want, but I ain’t stoppin’ for you.”
“Ca… can’t you just summon some huff, huff water, it’s harmless, just huff a little glass of water, please, I…”
He stopped talking for a moment, breathing heavily as Applejack steadily increased the distance between them.
“I see somepony. It’s… the rainbow one.”
Applejack stopped and looked up. As he said, Rainbow Dash was in the sky, flying in their direction.
“Hey!” Discord made a feeble attempt at yelling. “Rainbow Dash! Come down here!”
The distant shape was beginning to descend. “I think she sees us,” said Applejack over her shoulder. She turned and trotted back to him. “You remembered her name?”
“I have a fine memory for names,” he muttered. “I’m just not in the mood to make fun of the pony who holds my fate in her hooves.”
Rainbow Dash pulled up into a stall and touched down in front of them. “There you two are. Where have you been? Twilight says you were supposed to be in Ponyville eight hours ago.”
“Eight hours?” Discord scoffed. “Is that all?”
Rainbow Dash’s eyes shifted from Applejack to Discord and back again. A smirk grew on her face. “Did you guys walk all the way here from Canterlot?”
“Most o’ the way. The train… had an incident.”
“An ‘incident’, huh? Are we talkin’, like, a chaos magic ‘incident’, or just a Discord ‘incident’?”
Discord scowled up at her. “What, I don’t even have my magic powers anymore and you still want to blame me?”
“So it was your fault then.” Discord glared at her, and she laughed. “Alright, let’s get you two back to Ponyville. Twilight’s been worried sick.” She walked up to Discord and leaned over him. “Do you, uh, need some help?”
“You know what I need?” He pointed up at the sky. “I need you to get me one of those clouds up there. Clouds are made of water, right?” Suddenly, he reached up and yanked her face down to his. “I have been walking all night and haven’t had a single drop to drink.” He pointed at Applejack. “She says she won’t summon me any water! She doesn’t even want to use her chaos magic for something as simple and harmless as that! She thinks it’ll cause some sort of biblical flood or something, I don’t know! So please…” He let go of Rainbow Dash. “Get me a cloud.”
Rainbow Dash raised her eyebrows at Applejack, who surprised herself by shrugging almost sheepishly. “He’ll live. It’s the principle o’ the thing.”
“The principle of the thing. Right…” Rainbow Dash turned a smug grin to Discord. “Well, I’m sorry, Discord, but I’ve got a job to do, too.” She zipped off into the sky and settled on a cloud, letting it sink to a point just above his head. “I’m actually out here to gather these clouds up for a big rainstorm in town later today,” she explained. “I’m afraid I just can’t spare one.”
“Oh, my,” said Discord through gritted teeth. “The hospitality of you ponies. You really are showing me that there’s a better way.”
Rainbow Dash snorted. “Yeah, hospitality. We tried that.” She leapt to the ground, kicking dust in Discord’s face. “Come on. Let’s get back to Ponyville.”
“Fine. But somepony is going to have to carry me.”
Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes and began to walk away.
“Hey!” called Discord after her. “Hey! Don’t ignore me!” He sighed. “Fine. Applejack?”
With a shake of her head, Applejack followed after her friend.
“Oh, come on!” After a few moments, Discord reluctantly got up, making a show of grunting and quaking for no one in particular. “You athletic types don’t know what it’s like to be out of shape,” he muttered, and began to plod along after them.
* * *
“Ahh!” Discord slammed his glass down on the table with a satisfied thunk. “Thank you, Pinkie Pie. I feel much more like my old self again after some lemonade and… whatever this sugary stuff is. What is this, anyway?”
“Funnel cake!” said Pinkie Pie cheerfully. “I’m glad you like it! Funnel cakes rule!”
“I have to agree with you there. I’ve never actually gotten to taste food before, of course, so I don’t have much of a point of reference. I suppose you’ll be missing out on things like this from now on, Applejack. A real shame.”
Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes. “Yeah, Discord. She got the short end of the stick. You just keep telling yourself that.”
“I will, thank you.” He looked around the cheerful little bakery. “Sugarcube Corner…” he said to himself. “I’ll have to come back here some time. So!” He clapped his hooves together. “Judging by your eagerness to leave me behind in the harsh, grassy Equestrian outback, Rainbow Dash, I take it Princess Celestia hasn’t told you ponies the big news!”
Pinkie Pie gasped. “Big news? What big news? Is it exciting?”
“Very exciting!” said Discord. Applejack sighed as he put his foreleg around her shoulder. “Applejack and I…”
“Ooh! Ooh!” Unable to contain her enthusiasm, Pinkie Pie drummed her hooves on the table. “Are you getting married?!”
Rainbow Dash gagged and coughed up a second cherry onto her ice cream sundae. Applejack pushed Discord away. “No, Pinkie.”
Discord cleared his throat. “Yes, that’s… not quite it. I was going to say… we’ve traded jobs!”
Pinkie Pie raised an eyebrow at Discord’s slightly forced grin and turned to Applejack. “Really? You’re putting Discord in charge of Sweet Apple Acres?”
Discord deflated. “Just how dense are you ponies?”
“They’re not dense, Discord. How hard is it to say…” Applejack sighed. “…Fillies and gentlecolts, say hello… to the new Element of Honesty.”
Discord waved. “Yes, that’s me.”
“Oo-oo-ooh!” Pinkie Pie bounced up and down like a jackhammer. “That is exciting! Discord’s one of us now, Rainbow Dash! Isn’t that exciting?!”
Rainbow Dash looked like someone had offered her a heaping plate of snail entrails. “Discord? Honesty? Who the hay decided that?”
“That would be your friend here.” Discord slapped Applejack on the back.
Rainbow Dash looked to Applejack for confirmation. Discord looked offended.
“Look, now, who’s the Element of Honesty here? Are you going to trust the pony who just lost the job over me? Please!”
Applejack sighed. She had found herself doing that a lot lately. “Technically, Rainbow Dash, yes, the choice was mine. But my chaos magic went off the rails and made the choice for me.”
“Huh! ‘Your’ chaos magic? Sounds pretty fishy to me.” She glared at Discord.
Discord laughed. “What, you think I made her choose me? Why in Equestria would I do something like that?”
“I know why you would do it!”
All eyes turned to Pinkie Pie’s cheerful face.
She raised her hooves in a more energetic version of a shrug. “Because now that you’re an Element of Harmony, you get to be best friends with all of us!”
Rainbow Dash and Discord gave each other a look of mutual understanding across the table.
“Yes,” said Discord. “Exactly.”
Rainbow Dash opened her mouth to reply but was interrupted by forceful jangling as the door was shoved open.
“Applejack! Discord!” said Twilight breathlessly. “I heard you were here. Thank goodness. Where have you been?”
“Walking all the way here from Canterlot,” said Discord sourly.
“Only most o’ the way,” Applejack corrected him.
“Sheesh. Did something happen to the train?”
“Applejack happened,” said Discord.
“It was not my fault,” said Applejack. “Nothin’ too bad happened, anyway. It’s probably a good thing, in fact. It made me realize that me ridin’ on a train just ain’t safe yet. Especially with Discord.” Discord snorted.
Twilight took a seat at the table, nodding. “Safety first. That’s good. Princess Celestia sent a letter telling me you’d be on the train arriving at 11:30 last night, so you can probably see why I was a little worried.” She gave a harried laugh. “She didn’t mention the reason you and Discord, ahem… disappeared into thin air with no explanation and apparently ended up in Canterlot Castle discussing something extremely important with her and Princess Luna. Would you mind filling me in?”
“Oh, boy! Can I tell her?” Pinkie Pie turned to Applejack, who shrugged. “Okay! Twilight, I’d like you to meet… the newest Element of Harmony!” With a sweeping gesture, she smacked Discord in the face.
“Oww… Yes, hello. That’s me,” he said.
Twilight’s jaw seemed to have come unhinged. “What?” she managed.
“It’s true,” said Applejack. “Discord’s the new Element of Honesty. You’ll have to get used to it.”
“But… but… what, what about you, Applejack? Why can’t you be the Element of Honesty? And, and how could Discord possibly be an Element of Harmony? ‘Discord’ and ‘Harmony’ are literally opposites! How could Discord be the Element of Honesty, for Celestia’s sake? Discord promised he’d fix your farm if Fluttershy promised not to use the Element of Kindness against him. That was a lie! And the first time we faced him, he lied about the Elements being in the maze! Lying is all he ever does!”
“I’m right here, you know,” he muttered. “And I never lied about the Elements being in the maze. You were just too stupid to figure out my riddle.”
Twilight put her hooves on her forehead and slammed her face on the table. “Aaaauuuuugh! I can’t believe this! The fate of Equestria is this guy’s responsibility now?!” She leaned back and took a deep breath, then planted her hooves firmly on the table. “What. Happened?”
Applejack sighed. “I couldn’t be an Element o’ Harmony anymore after I got Discord’s powers. It was some kinda special case, so I had to choose the new Element of Honesty.”
“And you chose him?”
“It was an accident, Twi. My new powers got outta control, and, well…” She sighed even more deeply. “I blew it.”
Pinkie Pie laughed. “No, you didn’t, Applejack! I think you chose perfectly!”
Four very confused faces turned to her.
She shook her head, looking around at them amusedly. “Come on, Twilight. Don’t you remember the first day you spent in Ponyville, before you found out you were the Element of Magic?” She laughed. “You were so grumpy!”
Twilight looked away sheepishly. “I was having a bad day.”
“Still, the Elements of Harmony are what brought most of us together!” She put her foreleg around a very surprised Discord. “It’s up to us to show Discord the true meaning of friendship! And I can’t think of anyone who needs that more than him. There are so many adventures ahead of us! We can play games and have slumber parties and save the world together! I can’t wait!”
There was an exchanging of uneasy glances.
“But,” said Twilight hesitantly, “honesty?”
Pinkie Pie held Discord at arm’s length and studied his face intently. “Yeah,” she conceded. “That’s the hard part.”
Applejack and Discord followed Twilight as she trotted merrily through town. It was a bit early, but she had told them she’d been too anxious to sleep last night, putting her several hours ahead of schedule. Now that her two primary sources of concern had returned with both themselves and Ponyville intact and she was faced with the immediate prospect of putting chaos itself under the scientific lens, even the induction of one of Equestria’s greatest villains as an Element of Harmony couldn’t keep her spirits down for more than a few minutes.
“…and that would finally confirm the relationship between L.B. particles and amniomorphic fields!” She had been talking nonstop since they’d left Sugarcube Corner. “Ponies have suspected that amniomorphic fields would have an effect on the motion of L.B. particles passing through them for thousands of years dating back to when Star Swirl the Bearded was writing about them thinking they were composed of two particles, one with positive mass and one with negative mass—which is irreconcilable with modern theories of magic and spacetime, making the L.B. particle, because of its masslessness, the only one we know for certain is not composite—but it would require energy on the scale of exawatts to conjure an amniomorphic field in the presence of a strong emitter of L.B. particles, and since L.B. particles behave exponentially more like massless Ur particles, which are not affected by amniomorphic fields, as they increase in distance from one another, there’s no way we could obtain statistically significant results on the subject with a weaker emitter. The wonderful thing about this approach, however, is that we don’t have to bank on your chaos magic being powerful enough to actually conjure an amniomorphic field and bombard it with L.B. particles! Can you guess why?” Twilight suddenly spun around, grinning widely. Applejack and Discord stopped short.
“Uh… No, I can’t say I could. Sorry, Twi, but this is way over my head.”
Twilight’s smile faded. “Right. No, I guess you haven’t spent years studying theoretical physics, so of course none of this would make sense to you. You’re right.” She sighed. “Discord? Did you get what I was saying? Any of it?”
“Who, me?” He scoffed. “Please, Twilight. I’m Discord! I’ve been around since the dawn of time! I understood what you were saying better than you did.”
Twilight looked at him thoughtfully. “Hmm… Did you really? If that’s true, then maybe…”
Discord waved a hoof dismissively. “Of course it’s true. I’m the Element of Honesty, who else are you going to trust?”
Twilight gave him a rather un-trusting look. “Riiiight.”
“But it’s not as if I’m going to give all the secrets of the cosmos away just like that,” he continued blithely. “Say, weren’t we going somewhere? Why did we stop?”
The three of them begin to walk in the direction of the library again, and Discord went on. “Obviously, I would never give out information for free like that, not when it’s so much more fun to watch you stumble around blindly trying to figure it all out.” He chuckled. “But aside from that, as much as I’ve always tried to be a free spirit, one can’t help but end up with some long-standing… contracts, and obligations, you know, after living for a few thousands of thousands of thousands of years. I happen to know the lady in charge of those things you call ‘L.B. particles’, for instance. A real charmer she is, gives all of them cute little names, but she made me swear to secrecy the first time she let me into her workshop. I’d be in big trouble if I told you how they work. I’m sure you understand.” Discord nodded to himself, seemingly pleased with his explanation.
They walked in silence for a moment.
“You could’ve just told me you don’t know anything about physics,” Twilight muttered. Then, before he could respond, she threw open the door to the library. “Here we are. Spike!” she called.
Spike poked his head out from behind the staircase as the three of them walked in. “Heya, Twilight. Hey, Applejack. And…” He stared blankly at Discord for a moment, then snapped his claws. “Ha ha, Discord?” He trotted over for a closer look. “Wow, I can’t believe I recognized you now that you aren’t a hideous ten-foot-tall snake monster anymore.”
Discord snorted. “Spike, is it? My, my, I can’t believe I recognized you now that you’re not a hideous one-foot-tall snake monster anymore.” He slapped his cheek in mock surprise. “Oh, wait!”
Spike rolled his eyes. “I’m not that short.” He climbed onto Applejack’s back. “So, Applejack, you’ve really got all of his powers now? What kind of stuff can you do?”
“More than I know how to handle,” Applejack confessed. “It’s been pretty overwhelming, and I don’t have any idea what kinda limits these chaos magic powers o’ mine have. But that’s what we’re here to find out, ain’t it, Twilight?”
“That’s right,” said Twilight. “The laboratory’s in the basement. Spike and I have made sure everything we’ll need today is there and all of the instruments are calibrated, so we can start right now.” She beckoned. “Follow me.”
She led them around the staircase to the alcove where Spike had been when they’d entered, revealing a door Applejack hadn’t seen before. “What I don’t understand is why you don’t just ask me about all this,” said Discord as she opened the door and began to descend the narrow, wooden staircase. “I’ve been—or, at any rate, I had been doing this since the dawn of time, and I mean that literally. If you want to know, say, the number of positrons that would come out of my ears when I summoned a glass of water, I could tell you. I’ll even give you a hint: it’s zero.”
“Come on, Discord. We’re scientists,” said Spike proudly. “That means we trust the evidence of our eyes and our ears. And our machines. And reliable sources.” He crossed his arms. “Look, the point is, last time I checked, you weren’t a very reliable source at all.”
“For your information, Spike, you are looking at the Element of Honesty himself.”
“Ha! Yeah, right. That’s definitely a lie.”
“Actually, that one’s true,” said Twilight. “Something about Applejack losing control of her powers?”
Spike leaned against Applejack’s mane as he stared back at Discord, who grinned. “What.”
“We can talk about it later. For now, we have research to do.” Twilight opened another door. “Applejack, Discord, welcome to the lab.”
Applejack looked around at the room spread out below her, the basement floor still one more flight of stairs away. The space was oddly shaped—round and as tall is it was wide, roomy but somehow having the cozy, economical feeling of a shed or closet. There was wooden flooring, but it was otherwise carved directly from the packed subterranean earth, giving it the same uneven, organic aesthetic as the library’s upper floors. Thick, dry roots extended from the ceiling, snaking down the walls and curling around the strikingly large metal contraptions and glass tanks that lined them, connected by tubes and pipes. Even this area wasn’t free from a few bookshelves, though beakers, microscopes, and labelled bottles filled with chemicals and potions were more prevalent, arranged neatly on tables, cabinets, and shelves of their own. Shallow alcoves carved into the wall housed even more books and supplies, and lanterns that hung in them filled the room with a soft, muted orange light.
Off to one side of the room was what looked like their work area for the day. There was a tall metal box with a control panel, lots of unlit indicator lights, and a reel-to-reel tape drive—a mainframe, by the looks of it. Some supplies were arranged on a counter next to the mainframe, including books, bins, various instruments, and a teletype that seemed to be set up to deposit its output into a slot in the countertop.
“Hello? Earth to Applejack!”
Applejack became aware of Spike’s hand waving in her face. Twilight had reached the bottom of the stairs and was looking up at her, and Discord seemed to be looking for a way around her on the narrow staircase.
“Yes, Earth to Applejack, come in, please,” he said irritably. “I’m sure the view up there is excellent, but you seem to have left your body behind. Request that you move it before I move it myself.”
“Right, right, sorry. I’m movin’.” She resumed her descent. “This room’s a lot to take in.”
Discord shook his head. “Tut-tut. Sounds like a certain unimaginative pony hasn’t been exercising her mind’s eye. That’s how you see things now, correct?” He grinned smugly. “You know, I haven’t even mentioned yet just how convenient it is to have working real eyes. I don’t even have to think about something to see it anymore! Everything is just there. Hard to believe.”
“Alright, Discord.” Twilight was operating the mainframe’s controls. “If you’re done br” WHUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
Vibrations shook the whole basement for several moments as an exasperated Twilight flipped a few more switches and pounded a green button with her hoof, filling the room with silence once more. “If you’re done bragging about how great it is to not have immense cosmic power,” she continued, “we can do what we came here to do. Applejack, sit on this cushion, please.” She gestured towards a pillow lying on the floor across from the counter and pulled out a bulky metal helmet, tethered to the mainframe by a bundle of cables. “And take off your hat.”
Applejack did as she was told, and Twilight levitated the helmet over her head, letting it fit itself tightly to her skull with a pneumatic PHNK.
“Spike, could you get a second cushion for Discord?”
“Now, hold on one—” PHNK. “What are you doing? You’re supposed to be studying chaos magic, yes? Have we forgotten who the chaos magician is here?”
“You may not have your powers anymore, Discord, but we can’t just ignore your history. I wasn’t sure I’d have the opportunity to experiment on you earlier, but your body is very interesting to me.”
Spike set a second pillow down beside Applejack, and Discord grudgingly sat down on it. “Yes, I suppose I’ll have to get used to mares telling me that.”
Twilight snorted. “I’m mean I’m interested in where it came from. My hypothesis was that you were a pony before you became master of chaos, like Applejack, and the Elements reverted you to your true form. But if you’re as old as you say you are, then that’s impossible. I have no idea how the fully functioning pony in front of me was made.” She turned to the teletype, which was rapidly tiktiktiktiktiktiktik-ing out information with little regard for its presumably limited paper supply. “Hmm… Spike, take note,” she said.
He pulled out a notebook and pencil and looked up expectantly.
“Discord’s brain shows normal resting state activity. On the other hand, Applejack has no brain activity. She… Wait, what the…” She squinted up at Applejack, checking the indicator lights on her helmet. “The EEG output just went crazy, like it doesn’t know what it’s… Are you doing this, Applejack?”
“Uh… Yeah, probably. I guess I forgot to… have brain waves until you mentioned ’em.”
“Interesting. Spike, take note of that. But, um, Applejack… there isn’t really any point in having brain waves if you’re just making them up. You can, uh… turn them off now?”
With a slightly uncomfortable nod, Applejack complied.
“This means you might not have a normal brain, or if you do, you might not be using it. Hmm… Question: How does Applejack think? If her brain is gone, how did her memories and personality transfer to the new medium? For that matter, how did Discord’s new brain get programmed with his memories and personality?”
“Hmm, yes, of course, of course, well, scientifically speaking,” said Discord with mock pretension, “she is now a figment of her own imagination. Where would she even keep a brain?”
Twilight levitated a metal wand from the counter and waved it slowly around Applejack. “We’ll see.”
“What, are you going to scan her for a brain? Again? It would be much easier to just take my word for it, you know. I’m the Element of Honesty, after all. Who else are you going to trust?”
“My instruments,” said Twilight confidently. She checked the teletype. “According to this readout, there’s a naked singularity inside of… um… me.” She gave the wand a funny look. “Applejack, are you messing with my measurements again? You don’t even know what this does.”
“Sorry, I don’t mean to. It seems like it oughta be pickin’ somethin’ up, but I don’t know what to tell it.”
“Hmm…” Twilight sighed. “This is going to be difficult.” She began to wave the wand around Discord.
“Hey!” he said indignantly. “Is this really necessary? I am fairly certain that I have a brain.”
“Yes,” said Twilight, turning to the teletype. “And it looks like it’s right where it belongs, inside your head. That’s good. You also have a heart, two lungs, a liver… You seem to be pretty normal both inside and out.”
“Oh, what a relief.”
“Aside from that, though…” She furrowed her brow at the flood of data spewing from the machine. “You’re emitting a magical signature I don’t recognize. What’s even stranger is that normally only extremely high-level magical artifacts even have magical signatures, which would make you… an artifact?” She scratched her head. “The signature’s transcription would be R-O-Y-G-B-I-V.”
“Huh!” Spike looked up from his notes. “Like the colors of the rainbow.”
“Please, Spike. Indigo is a tertiary color. It’s not in the rainbow.”
He crossed his arms indignantly. “Hey, just because it isn’t like its six awesome friends doesn’t mean it can’t be a real color of the rainbow. Who else is going to keep violet company all the way at the bottom?”
Twilight looked at him for a moment, then chuckled. “Alright, alright. It doesn’t really matter anyway. You got that down, right? Let’s move on to the DNA test.” She levitated a pair of scissors from a bin and cut off a lock of Applejack’s mane that stuck out from under the helmet. She then placed it into a slot in a small device resting on the counter. The mainframe’s indicator lights began blinking, and the tape drive came to life with a loudly voiced whir-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r.
“It’s working. That’s interesting,” said Twilight.
“Should it not be?” asked Applejack.
The sound of the tape drive died down. “No,” said Twilight. “Cut hair doesn’t have any DNA in it.” She turned to the teletype, which was now typing at a much lessened but still fairly quick rate. “Your genome doesn’t have any significant matches with anything in my database. It’s pretty weird-looking, too. ‘agcgagacta, gaactgactc, something, something, alright, twilight, cut, it, out, this, takes, way, too, much, concentration…’”
She flipped a switch. The teletype stopped, and Applejack let out a sigh of relief.
“Most of those aren’t even nucleotides.” She studied the teletype’s output. “This can’t be what’s saved to the tape… Did you get all this down, Spike?”
“Yup!”
She pressed a button on the mainframe, and teletype resumed typing at its previous frenetic rate. “Also…” She turned back to Applejack. “You spelled ‘all right’ wrong. It’s two words: ‘all’ and ‘right’.”
Applejack shrugged. “Alright.”
“Your turn, Discord.” Twilight turned to the mini DNA sequencer.
“Does this mean you need some of my—YEEE!!” he shrieked as Twilight, without turning around, yanked a cluster of hairs from his mane. “YOW! OW! Ouch! Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow! Owie! Ahuh!” he whimpered as she inserted the sample into the machine. “Pain! Pain hurts! Oh, goodness, it reminds me of when Princess… but it’s so… ah!” He gritted his teeth. “Why? Why hasn’t it stopped yet? Twilight, make the pain stop! Now!”
Twilight rolled her eyes, watching the blinking lights on the mainframe. “Don’t be such a baby. The pain will subside in a few minutes.”
“A few minutes? That’s hundreds of seconds! I’ll never make it!” He slumped melodramatically to the floor, clutching his mane. “How could you do this to me? I thought we were comrades in harmony! I’ve been betrayed!”
Tak tak tak tak tak tak tak… “Your genome seems to match that of an ordinary pony perfectly. ‘ggcagcggcg, gcagcctaag, cagcagccgc, cctcgcagca…’ Hmm. You should have red eyes, and you do… You should be a unicorn, and you are… Yes, as far as I can tell, your genes match your body. Can you roll your tongue?”
“Impossible.”
“Really? You should be able…”
“I am in far too much pain,” he moaned, rolling over. “Oh, look at what you’ve done to me, Twilight Sparkle. Are you proud of yourself?”
“Knock it off.” She looked down at him. “I wonder what genes are responsible for your blue horn. I’ve never heard of a unicorn with a horn colored differently from their coat before.”
“Oh, those would be my… blue genes. Ha!” He clapped his hooves together and grinned up at the three of them. “Get it? Anyone? Anyone?”
Applejack sighed. “Sit up straight, Discord.”
He sighed. “I’ll do my best.” Slowly and laboriously, he began to push his trembling body upwards with his forelegs, only for them to give out and send him sprawling on the floor again. Then, in what he seemed to hope looked like a Herculean feat of determination, he began to push himself up once more, finally reaching a sitting position after a full ten seconds of grunting and groaning.
Spike clapped slowly. “Hooray for Discord. We knew you could do it.”
Discord gave him a dour look. “Don’t mock me, little dragon. You can’t even comprehend the sensation of having not one, but several hairs forcibly removed from your head at once.”
“Don’t make me laugh, Discord. Ever lost a scale? Now that hurts.”
Discord shuddered. “Yikes. Touché.”
“Alright, you two, let’s get back on topic.” Twilight took a hoof glove from one of the bins on the counter and pulled it over her right foreleg. “There’s one more passive property of yours I’d like to test today, Applejack. After this, we’ll start looking into what you’re capable of.” Applejack nodded, and Twilight raised her gloved hoof. “This glove allows my hoof to pass through solid matter, like so.” She waved it through the surface of the counter a few times. “It should also be able to pass through living flesh.” She swung at Discord, who flinched but, as promised, was unharmed. She nodded in satisfaction and removed the glove, placing it back in the bin.
Applejack watched confusedly for a moment, then smacked her forehead with her hoof. “Aw, shucks… That was just a normal glove, wasn’t it?”
Twilight tried visibly to suppress a grin. “Yes, it was.”
“What?” hissed Discord. “You could have hit me! I thought we’d established that I’m not a big fan of pain?”
Smiling covertly as she turned back to the counter, Twilight retrieved a pen and paper from the bin. Tilting the paper down so that Applejack could see it, she began to write…
And stopped. The pen wasn’t working. “Very interesting…” she mused.
Applejack blinked. “Uh, was that supposed to work? Did you make me break the pen somehow?”
“No. It’s out of ink. But you expected it to work, right?”
“I suppose so.”
“So there are situations where your expectations come true and situations where they don’t. The question is, where do you draw the line?”
“Nowhere with that pen,” muttered Discord as she put the pen and paper back in the bin.
Twilight cleared her throat. “Ahem. I’d say that if it’s somewhere between those two experiments, we must be in for something interesting. We’ll look into that later, though. Today we’re just getting a basic overview of how your chaos magic works.” She picked up a book from a stack on the counter and began to flip through it. “Before we move on, though, I told you I would learn a spell to help suppress your imagination for safety reasons, since you say that’s how you control your powers.”
“Did you?” Applejack furrowed her brow. “Oh, yeah… That was before you went and… bought that bucket o’ paint for me, wasn’t it? Huh… Almost feels like a year ago now.”
“Yeah, I can see what you mean.” Twilight yawned, looking tired for the first time that day. “We were both up all night. Alright, here’s the spell. This could actually qualify as another experiment, since I don’t know if mind-altering magic will even work on you.”
“I know you’re not going to listen to me,” said Discord, “but I’d just like to tell you in advance that it will not.”
Twilight shook her head. “Don’t listen to him, Applejack. We don’t know if your expectations can affect my spells.”
“Got it. If he’s wrong and you can turn off my powers just like that, then… shucks, that’s most o’ my problems solved right there.” She nodded. “Go ahead.”
The purple aura around Twilight’s horn grew brighter as she scanned the pages of the book. After a few moments, she set it down and shut her eyes, aiming her horn downwards at Applejack and gritting her teeth in concentration as the light grew brighter and brighter and whiter and whiter until…
CRACK. For a split second, a blinding flash lit up the room.
Twilight let out a deep sigh. “That spell’s… kind of crude. It could definitely stand… to be a bit less complicated.” She looked up. “I targeted teapots, just as a test. You shouldn’t be able to envision a teapot any…”
There was a full tea set on the counter.
Slowly, she nodded. “Okay, Discord. You were right. Now, who wants to break for tea before we move on to the active tests?”
