Butterscotch ducked down as tomato eagles swooped around him, his hair already looking like a bloody mess, if blood smelled like fresh tomato sauce. “Eris!” he called out. “Could you change these eagles back, please?”

“I’m a little busy over here!” the draconequus called back. She was trying to gather up the dancing athletic squashes as they moonwalked and somersaulted over her efforts to grab them and snap her talons to change them back. After Eris released her magic on the fruits to see if they could arrange themselves into different combinations of salads, inevitably the chaos magic made them sentient, and only wished them to become salads.

Wished, not willed.

Stranger things have happened with her magic, but Eris was rather getting tired of things getting out of hand. Er, paw , errr, claw? The discordian magic she placed on the bearers of harmony when she first fought them didn’t stop them (although in hindsight, she wasn’t complaining about that anymore). When she tried to play the blue flu joke on Dusk Shine and Prince Bolero, she couldn’t stop the magic from actually making her go through a real flu, although she tried to hide the fact it almost became real to the two princes. And then recently, at the Grand Galloping Gala, her ‘plus one’, Lord Smooze had gotten of control, although somehow Prince Solaris himself thought that was the most fun he had ever had at a gala.

She wasn’t willing to admit it just yet, but she was close to realizing that her magic has been, as a friend from another dimension would tell her, “on the Fritz” lately. For once, it was chaos magic that actually followed the definition of chaos, as she wasn’t even the one in control of it all.

“Blasted, stupid, little… AUGH!” Eris groaned. “Butterscotch, get out of the cottage, I’m just going to blow things up from the outside!”

“What!? My goodness, don’t blow up the cottage, Eris!” Butterscotch replied in terror, although he still inched towards the exit of the cottage.

“It’s not going to blow up the actual cottage, Butterscotch! I’m just going to reverse my magic hold on the chaos, which will cause the food to explode. And not in fiery ways.”

“Then just do it here. We can clean it up after!” Butterscotch yelled out, feeling his tail being pulled out from under him by a random cabbage monster.

“Your funeral for your bath water then,” Eris quipped before clapping her limbs. The whole room suddenly grew silent, the animated fruit and vegetables suspended in any action they were doing. After about five seconds, the magically enhanced food started to bloat up, and both Eris and Butterscotch retreated to a nearby wall.

“Aw great, this is going to cause weeks of bad mane days,” Eris deadpanned.

The squashes exploded first, sending showers of thick chunks everywhere in the room, pelting the two poor inhabitants. Next came the tomato eagles, coating the whole room in a thin but noticeable lining of tomato juices, and slathered the duo with such force Butterscotch’s mane was slicked back. Finally, the veins within the cabbage monster exploded like bad aneurysms, and sent a plethora of leaf pieces onto the draconequus and the pegasus, which stuck to their coats because of the tomato juices covering them.

Luckily for Butterscotch, the kitchen was the only place the food has staged its uprising so that room was the only casualty. However, it was trashed beyond normal levels for the pegasus -- bad even by the standard of Eris’s earlier memories before she was turned to stone the first time. Everywhere they looked, it smelled like an absolute wreckage of various fruits and vegetables, even if they were fresh.

“Well… that didn’t work.”

Eris twirled her fingers as the magically summoned cleaning supplies washed and shined the cottage of any trace of the remains of the short life of the sentient fruit. She waited outside the kitchen, Butterscotch looking over the remaining food stores to see if he was going to have no choice but to ask Eris for help.

It didn’t really strike her until now, but Eris realized that she had used up a LOT of food. And now a lot of that food was wasted, and she practically forced Butterscotch into the situation he was in now. It was her fault that things went wrong, yet again.

Usually, she did not feel any remorse for actions. She had been hated and shunned as the goddess of chaos for so long, she long since never cared about ponies feelings for her. But Butterscotch was different, and as Eris waited in front of the kitchen to listen to whatever the pegasus said, she began to hate herself. Why should she care so much about what Butterscotch was thinking of her right now? Sure, he was a friend, and one of her first friends in a long time, but she’s been through this song and dance before -- Trying to make a pony’s life interesting? Check. The plan going wrong somehow? Check. The pony being forced to accept real world consequences, because being the goddess of chaos means having wild powers beyond imagination? Check.

And right now, a goddess was scared that she was going to feel a consequence for the first time that wasn’t being encased in stone.

Butterscotch walked out of the kitchen with an unreadable expression, which set Eris on edge. The whole situation felt surreal to her, as she felt like she was testing the waters about something for the first time since… since her first few years as the master of chaos.

“Well, there’s not a lot in the food stores left for us, but luckily, the food for the animals was safe. We can go ask Dusk to see if he can lend us some bits to buy –”

“Do you hate me?” Eris suddenly asked, hanging her head low as her ears bent back, not exactly wanting to hear the inevitable answer she knew had to come.

“Wh…what? Eris, no, I don’t hate you,” Butterscotch replied, bringing a hoof up to support Eris. He felt her lean slightly into it, and was not about to mention how oddly heavy she felt. “Ponies make mistakes all the time, and –”

“Being here was a mistake,” Eris muttered bitterly.

“Hey!” Butterscotch yelled as kindly as possible. Maybe it was a bit much to yell, but he’s seen this behavior before, and he was not about to have a depressive draconequus blame herself for everything. “Don’t say that! What’s done is done, and I don’t hate you at all for ruining the food. I have plenty of friends who can help me if I need anything,” Butterscotch said soothingly. “C’mon, Eris, you being sad is scaring me. Where’s the Eris I know and like, who always has a smile on her face no matter what and is almost the female version of Bubble Berry?”

It took a couple seconds, but eventually a small smile appeared on Eris’s muzzle. “Too bad Cheese Panini got to him before I did.”

“What?”

“Anyways,” Eris straightened out from her sulking position, choosing to float in the air and uncurl her body, “You’re a better friend than most, Scotchy. Better than Solaris, back when he didn’t have a stick rammed up his –”

“Well,” Butterscotch interrupted Eris, more so out of not hearing the end of her sentence, “I just like to be there for friends. You’re not the first friend who became depressed and tried to blame themselves for the mess.”

“What!? I wasn’t blaming myself!” Eris defended.

Butterscotch raised an unamused eyebrow, “You were thinking I would hate you for causing this mess.” He raised a foreleg and gestured around the room, the cleaning supplies almost done with their tasks.

“Well, most friends aren’t half as kind as you. Most would just yell at me, usually.”

Butterscotch couldn’t help but smirk a little. “I’m the element of Kindness, remember?”

Eris scoffed in a playful manner. “Yeah, sure, when I haven’t tried to switch your element or when you try to be assertive. Although… I kinda like it when you’re assertive...”

“Really? I just think it makes me cause ponies scared of me. I don’t want ponies to be scared of me…”

And again, her little quip and tone went over the innocent Butterscotch’s head. Although, she liked how innocent he could be. It made him feel a little more genuine in his kindness, never thinking about himself, only about others.

“I’m sure ponies are just scared because they’re used to your usual self, and, uh, don’t know how to react to ‘enforced kindness’. Still…” Eris snapped her paw’s digits, making the cleaning supplies that were done with their work disappear one by one. Finally, a lone feather duster was just cleaning out a windowsill near the front of the cottage, until it too disappeared. Eris took a moment to look outside to see the sun had just set and the moon was now rising with the stars, the work of the Prince of the Night.

“Wow. Things sure got late fast. And we still haven’t eaten dinner…”

“We could go out to a restaurant to eat, if you’re willing to, um, pay for us…” Butterscotch suggested. The thought came to his mind that he should have suggested that in the first place instead of letting Eris get the idea to cook, but he shoved it down, as he didn’t want Eris to think about the mess that followed if she still blamed herself for it. Plus, like he said, what was done was done.

Eris lifted a talon to her chin to contemplate the idea and summoned a small coin purse to her paw. “I mean, sure, but let’s not go anywhere too expensive, you know?”

“How much do you have?” Butterscotch asked. Eris cracked open the coin purse and let the Pegasus look inside. Butterscotch leaned forward, but the closer he got, the bigger the purse seemed to be, until his head was completely swallowed by the purse.

Inside the purse was a whole room… no, field of golden, shiny bits, the horizon of the coins stretching as far as Butterscotch could see in the distance.

He pulled his head out of the purse, unblinking and staring in the distance beyond Eris. “Yup. I think that’s enough bits.”

Author's Notes:

Thanks to Eagle and Kalesh93 for the edits on this chapter!