Author's Notes:

I found it difficult to start this up again, despite the fact that it's a commissioned project, because lots and lots of people wanted something from this story that it cannot give, for plot reasons. So I'm gonna be straight with you guys. Those of you who said you didn't want to stick around if Eric just does the same things Discord did? May want to walk. He does more than Discord did -- for instance, there's a villain song! And pre-Fluttercord-like stuff in the next chapter! -- but the story is canon compliant, for reasons.

The villain song is based on Reviewing the Situation, Fagin's song from the musical Oliver!, based on Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. The performance in the link is Ron Moody, from the movie version.

I have actually written two chapters. I'll post the second one (aka Chapter 3) tomorrow. That will finish out "Keep Calm" and bring us into the area where most material will be original.

We walked to Fluttershy's cottage. Well, the ponies walked. I floated. God, I could fly. This was amazing. I wondered if I could fly like Rainbow Dash did, fast and zippy, since it seemed like mostly I was floating. I could probably do stunts like her, though. My body was incredible. I could twist myself into a pretzel, I could loop myself into loops, I could bend over and bite my own tail like an ouroboros. Also, if I had a dick, and the jury was out on that one since I hadn't found it yet, I was absolutely going to be able to suck it. First chance I got for privacy, I was checking that.

You'd think all this would weird a guy out. New body? Cool superpowers? Surrounded by aliens? Absolutely no reasonable explanation as to how you suddenly ended up in a fictional universe? But it didn't bother me. It felt – not normal, exactly, but exciting and fun. More like going to an amusement park you've never been to before with fifty dollars in your pocket when you're ten and amusement parks are still cool. Things are new and different and you don't know where stuff is and maybe you don't exactly know what to expect, but it all feels like it's gonna be great. And my body felt right, for the first time in my life. I'll admit it now; I've suffered from some severe body dysphoria throughout my life, enough to make me flirt with being otherkin for a while, except I could never make up my mind which animal I felt like; they all seemed not quite as wrong as my gangly, weird human body, but not at all right either. Obviously I'd needed to kin a draconequus. I kept touching myself – not in any kind of sexual way; Spirit of Chaos I might be, but the idea of doing something like that in front of these innocent ponies, who were probably all virgins except maybe Rarity and maybe her too because she was totally the kind who would save herself for marriage, was just appalling and gross. Also, still didn't know if I actually had a dick or not. No, I was touching my scales, and my feathers, and my fur, feeling the different sensations of my talons touching my fur versus my lion paw. Noticing the differences between the flat, horsehair-like fur on my face and neck, and the fluffy, thick fur around my body. The large, wide scales on the upper part of my tail, versus the tiny ones on my legs.

And my powers! I couldn't do everything I wanted to do, I couldn't do anything they could see unless it looked harmless to them, but I'd spent my life being fairly powerless and now I had the cheat codes to reality. I made an ice cream cone, and ate it upside-down like the cone was a straw I was sipping a milkshake through. I turned birds that no one was paying attention to into replicas of Tweety from Looney Tunes. I made a tree spontaneously produce rambutans (they are the weirdest looking fruit on Earth, being hairy and kind of remiscient of spiders), and then whacked the tree with a baseball bat and made them all fall. I made a frog sing "Hello, my baby, hello, my darling, hello, my ragtime gal," while dancing with a top hat on his head. They all kept glaring at me every time I did something they could see, like the gag with the frog... all except Fluttershy. Oh, I knew this playbook. Be the nice one, the permissive one, the friendly one, to get the kid to trust you. Sorry, dear Fluttershy, but I wasn't falling for it this time.

It felt so good to use the power. It wasn't even just the thrill of being powerful. It was like making cool stuff with Legos or Minecraft, except with reality, and the energy that I felt flowing through me... well, I've gotten high on occasion, and it felt kind of like that, except what if you could combine how weed makes you feel relaxed and makes you wanna think deep thoughts, with the high energy and the feeling that you are Getting Things Done that you get from meth. It was a sweet shock to my system any time I did anything. Wow. If this was how using his magic made Discord feel, no wonder he wouldn't give it up for anything.

I tried, experimentally, to make things that were just normal. Just snap a perfectly average frog into existence. I did it, but goddamn. You ever look at a thing that is so boring, you feel like your mind is just going to melt out your ears if you have to look at it for one more minute? Like you're at the doctor's office and all they have is magazines about retirement, home decoration, and sports you don't play? Or you ever want to make something cool in art class, except the teacher wants you to do the assignment exactly like she told you to, and yells at you every time you try to add even the tiniest of creative embellishments, so working on the project feels like running a cheese grater over your brain, it's so abrasive and painful? Making a normal frog was like that. Everything in me was screaming that this was a waste, it was boring, do something different, come on, maybe he could be a blue frog, maybe he could be an exotic Amazonian poison frog, what if he had giant flippers, what if his ribbits sounded like he was on helium? I resisted the temptation, but shortly after I made the frog I snapped him back out of existence because I couldn't stand knowing I had made something so boring.

Well. I didn't have any particular allegiance to Chaos as a principle – I mean, if I had to pick between Chaos and Order, sure, put me on Team Chaos, but I wasn't like a Warhammer fan or something. I didn't normally think about the world in terms of Order and Chaos. Turned out that with Discord's powers, Chaos and Order mapped almost perfectly to Creative and Fun vs So Boring I Want To Spork Out My Eyeballs. I didn't know whether the power had made Discord love Chaos, because goddamn was it ever fun, or whether it was the fact that he was the Spirit of Chaos that made his powers like it, but wow. I could see so easily now why he'd said chaos was a wonderful thing.

Anyway, so we all got to Fluttershy's cottage. I'd basically ignored everything the ponies had said on the way here because I'd been busy exploring my powers and my body, and all that'd they'd had to say had been endless repetition of how Applejack, Rarity and Rainbow Dash didn't think I was safe for Fluttershy to have in her house and Twilight was obviously on the verge of a cranial explosion because saying this was a terrible idea would be criticizing Princess Celestia.

As soon as we got inside, Fluttershy started zipping around cleaning up. Of course, her focus was all wrong. I couldn't have given less of a damn about clutter, but my brand new amazing nose could tell that... well, I'm sure Fluttershy worked hard to keep the place clean, but there had obviously been considerable quantities of poop, pee and animal stink all throughout the place. My nose wrinkled a bit, but I decided not to say anything. I fully intended to mock these guys, but Fluttershy was so gosh-darn earnest, insulting her for her stinky house seemed like kicking a puppy. I might be a bad guy now, but some things were just beyond the pale. So I snapped my fingers to sterilize and clean her couch, and then laid myself out on it.

"Fluttershy, why are you trying to clean up for this guy?" Rainbow Dash asked. "He's seriously not worth the effort!"

"He may be horrible," Fluttershy said, flitting around to put books away, "but that doesn't mean we have to act the same way. We should at least try to be hospitable." She went down to the floor to talk to her itsy-bitsy cutesy-wootsy bunny-wunny. "You don't mind giving up your favorite spot on the couch, do you, Angel Bunny?"

The rabbit apparently did most certainly mind, and with a series of angry squeaks, tried to remove me bodily from the couch by tugging on my foot. Sucks to be you, Angel Bunny, how sad that you can't negate the laws of physics and therefore a ten foot tall draconequus is much too large and heavy for you to budge.

Fluttershy flew over to me and said solicitiously, "Oh, I'm sorry about Angel. Are you alright?"

I decided to lay it on really thick. "Oh, yes. Thank you, Fluttershy, for your concern." I waved my hand. "If only your pony friends could be as considerate..."

Five colorful faces glared at me. "Don't listen to him, Fluttershy!" Rainbow Dash shouted in her I-sound-like-a-smoker voice, flying over to where Fluttershy hovered. "He's just trying to drive a wedge between us like he always does."

I threw up my hands. "Now why in the world would I ever try to do a thing like that?" It's not like my name is Discord or something.

Rainbow Dash hovered directly above me. "So we can't unite and use the Elements of Harmony against you, that's why!"

"I never thought of that!" I said in the most exaggerated voice I could muster, one finger to my chin.

Rainbow Dash did not appreciate my sarcasm. "You big liar!"

Man, I love wordplay. I used to provoke older foster siblings into chasing me or beating me up by saying things like "Wow, are they really having sex? Can I see?" when they'd say "Did you take my fucking socks?" (The answer, by the way, was yes. Nothing works as well to hassle people as to take small unimportant things they expected to find in a specific place and hide them somewhere. It helps them learn about what truly matters in life, since the unimportant things generally become really important when they can't be found.)

So I shrank myself and said, "Now, look who's a liar. Anyone can plainly see that I'm not big at all."

Unfortunately, Angel the misnamed took the opportunity to try to reclaim his position on the couch, so I right-sized myself. I misjudged my own size, though, so my head ended up knocking Fluttershy's lamp off the end table, and it shattered.

Poor Fluttershy looked utterly horrified. What, was the thing an heirloom from her dead grandmother or something? I rolled my eyes, got to my feet, and snapped my fingers, making the pieces of the lamp reconstitute themselves as a very art nouveau interpretation of me in broken glass. "There, all better." Then, because Angel Bunny had jumped up onto the couch again while I was briefly standing on it, I whacked him with my tail and stretched out on the couch again.

None of the ponies appreciated my artistic talents. Applejack put her hat on her face. "I can't watch..." she muttered, and headed for the door, followed by the entire herd.

Twilight was the only one who paused at the door to check. "You sure you're okay with this?" she asked Fluttershy. Plainly nobody was going to ask me. I lay back with my eyes closed, pretending I was taking a nap while exercising my amazing hearing. At least until the rabbit showed up and tried to pull on my leg again. Then I started goofing off, making the couch float, scooting it around, and so forth, just to annoy Angel, who kept trying and failing to chase after me. I was still paying attention, though.

"I know it's not gonna be easy," Fluttershy said, "but Princess Celestia's counting on me. And... I think I actually know what to do."

Twilight said, "You do?" Wow, your faith in your princess' ability to pick the right pony for the job is sad, Twilight. I considered doing a Darth Vader bit with "I find your lack of faith disturbing", but decided it was kind of pointless because no one here had seen Star Wars. Besides, I wanted to hear Fluttershy's devious plans for me. Please, Fluttershy, do go on.

"I think the key is to befriend him. Being kind to him and letting him be my house guest is probably the best way to do that."

I opened my eyes just so I could roll them. (Not like dice, this time.) Oh, yes, Fluttershy, I'm so desperate for a friend I'm going to follow you around like a puppy and do whatever you say because you let me crash at your house. She had no idea how many people I'd couch-surfed in my time, and what absolute tools most of them turned out to be.

"And you really think that'll work?"

"I think it's worth a try," Fluttershy said, like every social worker who thought I could be helped if they just tried the new therapy fad.

"Okay, but if you need us, all you need to do is whisper "help", and we'll be back here with our elements," Twilight said. And then she looked straight at me, playing with Angel. "So watch that goat-legged step of yours, pal!"

I was startled; though I'd been listening to the conversation, I wasn't really expecting the focus to suddenly be back on me again. On the other hand, I never turn down attention. "What?! Look at me!" I declared, creating a pair of elegant high-backed chairs and dressing myself in clothes straight out of Alice in Wonderland, with Angel in the other chair, both of us holding teacups. "I'm practically reformed already."

Twilight obviously needed to learn my spell for transforming and rolling eyes, because she plainly really wanted to be able to do that. A vigorous eyeroll later, and she was out the door and Fluttershy was closing it on her.

I didn't think it was particularly safe for me to not listen in on the conversation outside, so I abandoned Fluttershy for the roof of her tree cottage, and leaned down to listen in. I could hear Fluttershy hunting around for me, calling my name, but that wasn't the important thing to pay attention to here. The five mares who held five out of six parts of the Anti-Me Friendship Laser were talking amongst themselves, and after you've irritated the crap out of your teacher and they're having a private conference with your foster mother du jour, it's always a good idea to listen in.

"She's really alright with him staying there?" Rarity asked.

I could hear the shrug in Twilight's voice. "That's what she said."

"Personally," Rainbow said loudly, as if she talks any other way, "I think we should come up with a backup plan, in case this whole 'befriending' business doesn't work out."

"Rainbow Dash is right," Rarity said. "This is Discord we are talking about, girls. It wouldn't be a bad idea to have another trick up our sleeves."

"And I think I know just the trick," Twilight said in the kind of voice that should have been accompanied by evil steepled fingers. Unfortunately she only had hooves, and you can't steeple hooves. "Back in my library, I've got quite a few reforming spells."

My ears perked up so hard they jumped off my head. Literally. My powers apparently do stupid jokes even when I'm not actively trying to make them. Reforming spells? Doesn't a spell that reforms someone sound just a tad like magical brainwashing?

Pinkie said, "It'd be good to make him realize it's better to make ponies happy, but you can't make him not-chaosy, Twilight, that would be wrong! You can reform someone who's evil but you can't make them stop being who they are!"

"I don't have to make him not-chaotic, Pinkie. Not evil is the goal here."

Oh, like you can tell the difference between chaos and evil, Twilight. As nearly as I could tell, Pinkie might literally be the only pony who could tell the difference, judging from the fact that the Cutie Mark Crusaders had looked at my statue – which looked like it was laughing or singing – and declared me to be "confusion", "chaos" and "evil." I mean, maybe I'd been doing something to make them fight with each other – I mean the real Discord, obviously – but confusion, chaos and evil? Really?

They all trotted off, Twilight and Spike making a beeline for the library. I got there first. The first thing I thought of was to get rid of all the books that contained the reforming spells, but as I thought the question "where are the books", so many of them lit up that I realized Twilight would instantly know something was wrong. On the other hand, they were big thick books. What if the spells she was looking for just... happened to not be there?

Maybe I was being a bit of a hypocrite, considering that I'd mesmerized all of her friends, and Fluttershy, I'd cheated with. But that was the real Discord; I was a human, much as this felt so much more fitting and right than anything from my human life, and humans consider mind control to be awful. Cast a spell to just magically make someone want to behave themselves and be socially appropriate? That was my idea of evil, not making some pies float or shrinking myself for a dumb joke. Yeah, I'd done it too, but I really didn't have any control over what the real Discord had done in the past, did I? I identified pretty strongly with Discord, but at the end of the day... I wasn't really him, right? So I felt free to work myself into an absolute froth of outrage over Twilight deciding to use mind control on me.

I snapped my fingers and summoned all of the spells straight out of the books, tearing them loose. There were like 40 or 50 of them. Wow, Equestria. So many reforming spells in one mare's library? That was genuinely scary. Maybe this pastel pony paradise wasn't such a utopia after all.

But if Twilight found me around here, she'd know I was up to something. And if Fluttershy couldn't find me, she might summon her friends to look for me, assuming I'd flown the coop. I was definitely not done with Fluttershy. So I teleported back there, manufacturing a bowl and sitting back on the couch, because what if Twilight had some kind of spell that could reconstitute a book page out of shredded-up bits? I had to destroy these pages so utterly they couldn't possibly be restored. And I kept remembering a scene from one of the Q episodes where the Klingon had hit Q with a genuine zinger and Q responded with, "Oh, very good, Worf, eat any good books lately?"

If I ate the pages, there was no way Twilight was reconstituting them.

Fluttershy stuck her head into the room. "Discord?" she said in a very slightly panicked voice, and then, relieved, "Oh, there you are. Listen, Discord, I just want to make sure you know that if there's anything I can do to–" At this point she realized what I was doing. "Umm, are you eating... paper?"

I had a delicious bowl of the pages I'd ripped out of Twilight's books, which I'd used my powers to make taste like nachos, and I was chowing down with a fork because when you look like a scary monster, it is so much more hilarious to behave as if you're a gentleman of breeding and refinement. I glanced at Fluttershy. "Am I? Oh, how odd of me." I munched on another page.

"Well, um..." She forced a smile on her face. I could tell. Ponies are not particularly good at acting, is what I'm saying. "I'm just heading out, so you just make yourself at home while I'm gone."

Wait, she was leaving? She was heading out and leaving me by myself?

I popped over to the door in a pink housecoat as she left, waving at her as she left. "Buh-bye, have a nice time! Everything is fine here. Bye bye... Bye bye..."

Okay, I was milking it, but firstly, ponies are really gullible, and even among a very gullible species, Fluttershy's picture would be found in the dictionary illustrating the word "gullible". (Or at least if I told her so, she'd probably believe me.) And secondly... I was so excited! Time to myself! Time not under the watchful supervision of mistrustful ponies! Ah, bliss!

I shut the door and turned around. There was Angel Bunny the misnamed, the jerk who once slapped Fluttershy for not making him the exact salad he wanted. So I grinned evilly (it turns out you can, in fact, feel that your grin looks evil), and waved a carrot at him. "You like carrots, Angel?" I whapped him with the carrot, knocking him over. "I'm playing your owner for a fool!" I laughed, because if Angel did manage to explain to Fluttershy what I'd said, I'd just make big eyes and talk about how I understood that jealousy can make people, and presumably animals, lie, and I'd act sad, and Fluttershy would buy it completely. And then I projected myself into the carrot and continued to grin evilly. "How d'ya like them carrots?"

Angel was not much for seeing his carrot suddenly grow a face. He shrieked and ran off. Me, I flopped down on the couch to engage in some hard-core paper snacking.

Of course, it was important to keep an eye on what was going on. I manifested a styrofoam dodecahedron, and cast my consciousness out to summon images of what all my new pals were up to, which displayed on the panels of the dodecahedron. Fluttershy was... getting groceries? Wow, that made sense. I have a dangerous and nigh-omnipotent god of chaos in my house, so of course, it's grocery shopping time. Rainbow Dash... was flying circles around Fluttershy's house, occasionally kicking a cloud so anyone with only one brain cell, which describes most ponies, would think she was doing her job and not stalking Fluttershy. Rarity, Applejack and Pinkie Pie were doing boring pony things; you'd think Pinkie might at least be entertaining, but she was baking something, and watching someone else bake is very dull, especially when they're not going to invite you to eat it when they're done. Princess Celestia was eating cake and drinking tea with Luna and Cadance. Ah, so that was what a royal summit looked like. I was tempted to drop in on them, but the fact that I didn't actually know their history with Discord, and I didn't want them to know that this body was under new management, convinced me it was a bad idea.

Besides, Twilight was getting to be very entertaining.

There she was, searching fruitlessly through a spellbook. I let sound come in, and heard her say, "That's weird. The spell I had in mind isn't in here. Spike, where are the other books I asked you to pull?"

In the pane of the dodecahedron I could see Spike staggering toward Twilight with a giant pile of books. Meanwhile, Fluttershy at the market was giving herself a pep talk. "You can do this, Fluttershy! You're strong, and Princess Celestia has faith in you!" She was doing deep breathing exercises. I assumed from the bit about Princess Celestia that she meant me, although given Fluttershy's history, if it hadn't been for that line I'd have thought maybe it was the market itself triggering her.

She was interesting, Fluttershy was. I wondered if I was supposed to hold a grudge, if Discord would have. Twilight Sparkle had rallied her friends and defeated me – well, Discord, but having spent some time in stone I could empathize – but Fluttershy had forced me to cheat at my own game.

I could imagine it vividly. Now that I could wield Discord's power, I knew what it felt like to warp a pony's personality. The research he'd done, reaching out from my stone prison with the barest sliver of power I could muster up, to analyze who the ponies who bore the Elements of Harmony and identify their weaknesses, the points I could attack to get through their defenses and warp them. (I did not, and still don't, like the verb "discord" that the fandom uses to describe the process of warping a pony's personality. I've got more going on than that! Well, Discord does.)

I knew how he'd gone after the traits in them that could most easily oppose their Elements. Pinkie, made to think that laughter was being turned against her, like when she was a rube from the sticks fresh from the rock farm and nopony in Ponyville got her jokes, and she was still a kid, so they mocked and bullied her. Rarity, who in fact is always incredibly greedy, but she craves high status and good reputation more than she wants stuff... most of the time. Applejack, who lost some friends in childhood because she was too honest with them, and it upset her so much she ran off to Manehattan to try to live with her Orange relatives. Rainbow Dash, whose famous "loyalty" can be split if you pit her family and her home against her friends, like pretty much anyone's loyalties would be...

...how exactly did I know any of this? Was I subconsciously tapping Discord's memories? If so, cool, but was there a way I could do it deliberately?

Also... what had happened to the real Discord? I mean, I'd thought the guy was awesome... I didn't want to be taking his place by shoving him out of it. Had he died? Found himself in my body? (Which might be the same thing, considering the truck...) Was he drifting around as a disembodied spirit? I wished there was someone I could ask, but I couldn't admit I wasn't the real Discord. What if they tried to do an exorcism or something to summon the real Discord back, because they decided I was an even bigger jerk? I liked the guy, but unless someone gave me a different body to occupy, I didn't like him enough to die or become a disembodied ghost for his sake.

Anyway! I wrenched my mind back to what I was doing, wondering if that kind of thing had happened to the real Discord. It certainly had happened to me a lot in my life. I was checking up on Fluttershy, right? Because I had targeted the bullying she'd suffered her whole life and how everyone looked down on her and thought of her as weak, even her friends... and she'd beaten me. Discord. She'd beaten Discord. She'd deflected everything he'd thrown at her and in the end he'd had to use brute force to warp her.

So there she was having a panic attack and it was so easy to think so little of her. Smiling and being friendly and then panicking when I couldn't see her anymore, probably hating and fearing me as much as the other ponies but faking it, like the social workers who I was sure had secretly hated my guts. It seemed like it would be so easy to crush her, to make her run away screaming... or to trick her into letting me get rid of her Element. Was she really that kind? I'd seen the Iron Will episode and the one at the Gala when she was running around screaming "YOU WILL LOVE ME!" Did she have secret desires to lash out at the ponies who treated her badly, and I just needed a way to bring it out? Or was she actually as milquetoasty as she was in that episode where Angel slapped her and she just took it?

But I had to remember. She'd been the only one who stood up to me, the only one who resisted my effort to bring out her dark side. Fluttershy wouldn't crumble. Fluttershy was a grass, bending in the wind but insidiously growing into everything, even cracks in the sidewalk blocks away from any other greenery. (I think. I'm not a gardener.) Fluttershy was gentle but relentless. I needed a strategy, something other than "irritate her until she gives up and tells the others to go ahead and turn me into stone."

Well, I didn't know if Discord had been a master planner, but I knew I always preferred to fly by the seat of my pants. Something would come up and I'd find a way to work with it.

In the meantime, Twilight was discovering that none of her books that were supposed to have reforming spells in them actually did. Serves you right, Twilight. "Reforming spell" my ass. I don't approve of mind control. The kind of thing Discord did where he warped ponies' personalities was bad too, to be honest, but I wasn't the one who did that... even if I could remember exactly how to do it if I wanted to.

And there was Twilight freaking out. "Princess Celestia didn't cast a spell protecting our books! Everywhere I thought I'd find the reforming spell..." She gasped. Wow. Is it such a surprise to you that I don't want to be lobotomized with a rusty buttonhook? How do you hold the moral high ground against Discord warping your friends if you're willing to do the same thing to him?

But that raised a question.

Here and now, I was a villain. How much morality did I want to have? I had my own ideas about what Discord's morality might have been, and all evidence suggests I was right – if Discord was a killer, would Celestia have left me with Fluttershy? But I also knew he'd done things that made me uncomfortable. Did I want to continue to do those things? Did I have a choice?

Could I quit being a villain if I wanted to? I didn't have a script writing me; as far as I knew I had free will. I could, theoretically, reform on my own. I could give up the chaos – I wasn't the real Discord, so I wasn't the real Spirit of Chaos, right? Using my magic to turn the world upside down felt so good, but I wasn't really a draconequus chaos spirit, I was a human who'd spent my life without that power, so I could give it up if I chose, right?

I floated in midair, lost in thought, not particularly paying attention to the screens of my dodecahedron, as I thought it over... and the first few lines of a song came to me, a parody of a song from a Broadway musical (one of my foster mothers was very into Broadway musicals, okay?). I started to sing it. My singing voice has never been great, and turning into Discord didn't fix that, but there was no one here for me to be embarrassed by except Angel Bunny, and seriously, I did not care what a rabbit thought of my singing voice.

"I'm reviewing the situation
Can a fellow be a villain all his life?
All the trials and tribulations!
Should I settle down and stop creating strife?"

And then the rest of the song started to trickle into my head. I'd never heard them do a song parody on the show, probably for copyright reasons, but I didn't have to worry about that. I'd actually kind of ignored the songs on My Little Pony; I'd never been much into music, so my headcanon had always kind of been that they weren't really happening, kind of like some of the goofier cartoon effects. Well. Apparently I was wrong.

"If I let ponies disarm me
And join them to spread harmony,
And friendship, love and happiness
And live here in eternal bliss.
A normal life in Ponyville...
Oh dear, the prospect makes me ill
I think I'd better think it out again!"

As I sang, I created visuals, picturing a Discord with a broad friendly smile on his face, helping little old mares across the street, manifesting ladders to get kittens out of trees, carrying foals around in his arms, petting puppies... ugh. No no no. My stomach churned at the thought. I'd never have wanted that kind of life as a human, let alone as a powerful chaos mage.

"I'd never want to be normal, anyway
It sounds awfully dull, anyway.
But I'm all alone in a world,
That I don't understand
And I'm here in a pony's house
Totally unplanned..."

Until I sang it, I hadn't realized how much it was bothering me that I was here in the pony world. Oh, sure, in so many respects it was a dream come true; my body felt right for the first time in my life, my senses all seemed so much keener, I felt so much more alive... and the magic, of course. But... all I knew about this place was two and a half seasons of a half hour kids' cartoon, and whatever mysterious not-quite-memories I was getting from Discord's brain. At home, at least, I'd known how everything worked. I didn't even understand my own magic, let alone anything else about this world, and I was all alone in my ignorance. It was a weakness, so there was no one I dared talk to about it... not as long as I was a villain.

"I'm reviewing the situation,
I must think of all the pony fic I know.
Think of stories where my creation
Of rampant chaos turned into a big fat no"

Could I live without my chaos? If I didn't want to fight ponies, if I wanted to have companions I could get along with... if I wanted friends, the ride-or-die kind of friends that ponies made rather than the superficial relationships I'd had with every human in my life... would it be worth it? And could it happen?

"What does Discord do when harmlessness
becomes the goal, and nothing less
Is tolerated; oh, what stress!
Could friendship truly come of this?
Do I need chaos? Can I live
Without it; and will they forgive?
Embrace a villain as a friend?
...I know better, why e'en pretend?

I think I'd better think it out again."

I bounced all over the inside of the house, leaping onto furniture with a microphone to sing, twirling in midair, throwing the back of my paw against my forehead when I sang about the stress it would cause to try to be good, and making images appear of the Mane 6, all around me, smiling up at me...

...and then hung my head as the implausibility of that struck me, and I sang about knowing better than to think I could have friends. At home I'd been a fellow human, not nearly as weird looking as Discord, and the chaos I'd caused had been within normal human limits, and I still hadn't had any friends. Here... I was a villain who'd brainwashed everyone, who looked completely bizarre, who was a different species, and who still had the power to do almost anything. No, of course I wouldn't have friends here.

But did I have to have enemies? Did I need to have the Elements of Harmony, the only weapon that worked against me, as my enemies?

"So should I go hide somewhere?
Would ponies track me down? Would they care?
If I kept my chaos far away
Maybe the ponies would let me play
There have got to be species who really know how to have fun
And if I only knew where, there I could run

I'm reviewing the situation.
I've got no interest in creating harmony
But is it such a humiliation
For the lord of chaos to pack up and flee?"

I manifested a backpack, a few pieces of luggage, and a lot of travel flyers, which I skimmed through while I sang about reviewing the situation.

"The Elements of Harmony
could go back to their armory
And I'll be in a distant land
Maybe in one that's full of sand
Creating chaos as I like
A tree of pies! A flying bike!
And I'm certain in this far off place
There will exist a different race
Who'll never tattle to Celestia
And send the Elements there to get'cha...
I think I'd better think it out again."

This time a beach appeared all around me, while I was attired appropriately in swimming trunks and a Hawaiian shirt. The tree of pies appeared, and I rode around it on the flying bike, singing the rest of the stanza... which, of course, ended with the bitter realization that Celestia wasn't going to tolerate me just going off to cause chaos in another country.

"I can't have a friend, I know that now.
Don't want to stop chaos, anyhow.
And whether I stay or I go they will hunt me down
So I might as well go back to deposing the crown..."

I picked up the tempo and moved faster, twining myself around a pole I'd made, doing cartwheels in air, shimmying like I had when I'd broken out of stone, flipping upside down and catching a trapeze with my tail... that sort of thing.

"I'm reviewing the situation.
I'm a villain and a villain I shall stay!
You'll be seeing no transformation,
But it's wrong to be a rogue in ev'ry way.
I won't employ more mind control,
I do not want to warp a soul.
No turning anyone to stone
Don't turn a young mare to a crone
Especially I will not kill
And I'd rather not destroy Ponyvih-hi-hille

I think I'd better make a plan again!"

Well. That was a thing that happened.

I jumped down off the floating sofa into midair and re-summoned my dodecahedron. Crud. Fluttershy was on her way home. Since my little soul-searching session had come down pretty hard on the "being a villain" side, I needed to figure out what my endgame was.

I was Discord. I broke up friendships. I caused chaos. I disrupted harmony. So. Discombobulate Fluttershy, make her uncomfortable, push her boundaries while saying all the right words to make her think she was on track for reforming me.

Dangle the carrot in front of her on a pole and lead her off a cliff. Metaphorically speaking. I'd decided I wouldn't kill or cause grave physical harm if I could avoid it, and she was a pegasus anyway.

While I'd been jumping and dancing in mid-air, I'd observed that Fluttershy's house had a structure I only saw in rich people houses, back home, but was probably normal for pegasi. Her living room went up to the top of the house. There was a discreet kitchen on the first floor, and stairs neatly tucked away that went up to an interior balcony running around the house. That was probably where her bedroom and bathroom were. But here, in the central room of the house, there was a lot of space to maneuver.

I lifted the house into the air, and started spinning it top over bottom, making everything inside the house fall, and keep falling because gravity wasn't stable enough for most things to ever hit the ground. Some things did, and slid along the walls.

This was the scene Fluttershy flew into, managing to barely dodge her own door smacking her in the head.

"Um..." She was plainly at a complete loss for words. "Uh..."

I lay in the sofa, which I was keeping stable, suspended in the middle of the room, as I finished up the last of the paper. "Are you sure this isn't overdoing it?" I asked, in a butter-wouldn't-melt-in-my-mouth tone. "You said to make myself at home while you were gone, but I wouldn't want to overstep my bounds."

Oh, it was hard for her. I saw that. I saw her force down whatever her first reaction was going to be. "I did say that, so... if this makes you more comfortable..." She dodged an object that nearly fell on her head. "By all means, please feel free."

I stretched out, throwing my arm behind my head. "Oh. Well, it does, very much so." Then I teleported right behind her, stretching my neck around hers. "You're so very kind, my dear Fluttershy." I put my hands on her shoulders (wait, wasn't there a special pony word for those? Crap, I don't really know anything about horses) and said, "I always knew that you were the understanding one, not like those nasty friends of yours."

That got her mad. She pointed a hoof at me and almost yelled, "My friends aren't nasty!"

"Well, of course you'd say that." Hands back on the shoulder. "It just goes to show how understanding you truly are." Through a mirror that kept spinning around on the wall, never quite falling off, I could see her infuriated expression, so I backed off and teleported back to the couch. The secret to really getting people's goat is to know when to fold. "You know, I think Princess Celestia is right when she singled you out as the one who could reform me. You're off to such a good start, I'm seriously considering actually being reformed." I was laying it on so thick and syrupy, I'd have gotten diabetes if I hadn't made a second face behind my face and made a raspberry.

Outside we could hear Twilight shouting. "Fluttershy, can you hear me?"

"Goodness! I hear Twilight!" Fluttershy, who had probably been desperately hoping for an interruption like this, flew off, but not before grabbing the bunny rabbit, who was finally falling. Curses, Angel Bunny, I finally get gravity to outrun you and there's Fluttershy to the rescue.

This time instead of a styrofoam dodecahedron, I made a baseball out of crystal and gazed into it, watching Twilight freak out completely. Fun times. "Fluttershy, what's going on? Are you okay?!"

Fluttershy landed. "We're fine. Everything's going great. Isn't it, Angel?" Her bunny did not back up her statement, but staggered off like he was drunk.

Twilight, still in full freakout mode, said, "We've come to get you away from Discord! He's just terrible and, from the looks of it, completely out of control!"

"Oh, but you're wrong!" Fluttershy said. Ah, Fluttershy. My one supporter among ponykind. I wondered how long that would last. "We're making great progress!"

"Seriously?!" Twilight's exclamation was joined in by Spike.

"I'm earning his trust by giving him a little space to be himself," Fluttershy said. Do... do you guys know I can hear you? I'd never directly caught a social worker being quite that blatant about trying to manipulate me.

"Hate to break it to you," Spike said, "but he used that 'space to be himself' to tear out all the reforming spells from the library!" He displayed a book with missing pages, apparently thinking Fluttershy would find this as appalling as Twilight did.

She did not. "That does explain the paper eating..." she said thoughtfully, with no sign that she considered the action to have any moral valence for good or evil. Way to go, Fluttershy! Recognize that reforming spells are terrible and I was well within my rights to get rid of them!

"He ate them?!" Twilight groaned in frustration, although it was loud enough to almost sound like a scream.

"But we aren't going to need a spell," Fluttershy said passionately. Well, as passionately as you get with her tiny little voice. "He's already really considering being reformed! He said so."

"And you believed him?" Okay, gotta give this one to Twilight. I wouldn't believe me in this circumstance.

"If I'm going to be his friend, I have to start by giving him the benefit of the doubt!" Well, that made sense. Manipulative as hell, still, but it did indicate that Fluttershy might possibly not be a completely naïve idiot. "Tell you what. Bring all the ponies over for a dinner party this evening, and I'll bet his manners will have really improved by then! I'll even get him to put the cottage back on the ground first."

Oooh! A dinner party? A fahncy dinnah pahty? (I'm sorry, I can't write out a fake posh British accent.) I could have fun with this.

Twilight's eyeballs continued to say "Seriously? Seriously?" until finally she looked down and sighed. "All right. Dinner it is."

Of course I had to pretend I hadn't been listening in, so when Fluttershy told me eagerly that she thought it would be a wonderful opportunity for me to demonstrate my true interest in reforming and making friends by having a fancy dinner party, I didn't let on that I already knew about her plan. "What a splendid idea!" I said. "A fancy dinner party! I don't think I've ever had one of those. You'll have to tell me all the rules of etiquette, I can never remember which spoon goes with which dish!"

Fluttershy giggled nervously. "I don't think we need to get that fancy," she said. "We're not hosting the princess, just my friends."

"I suppose," I said. "It's important to make a good impression, but, between you and me?" I teleported to float right next to her ear, in miniature so I was basically ear-sized, and whispered. "No matter what impression I make, I'm sure they'll never like me."

"That's not true! My friends are good ponies; I'm sure that if they see you're really trying to reform and make friends, they'll appreciate that."

I knew better. Part of the reason I was saying it was because I wanted to drive a wedge between Fluttershy and her friends; it seemed logical to me that the Elements of Harmony wouldn't work for a group full of internal conflict. But part of it was just true. Fluttershy was the social worker, the one who had to pretend to like me in order to get me to behave; the others were under no such restriction.

"I'd like to get ready for the party. I have groceries outside, but I don't want to try to put them away with the house spinning like this. Do you think you could put it on the ground?"

"Of course," I said grandly, wearing a tuxedo with cape and top hat and a mask because I have never actually seen anyone wear a tuxedo with a cape outside of Sailor Moon and I was ripping off Tuxedo Mask. I bowed, and teleported the house to the ground, melding it back with its foundation. "Anything for you, milady." The thought occurred to me that if I was going to call her milady I really ought to have snapped up a fedora or trilby, but I decided it didn't matter because she wasn't going to get the joke either way.

All of her stuff was a complete mess, lying all over the ground completely disorganized. Something inside me that's always tense when I go to a new foster family's house and they've made it painfully neat and clean for my arrival started to loosen up and relax. I guess I've always had an affinity for chaos; I prefer a disorganized mess to anything neat and efficient. It doesn't look alive if it's neat. Houses that are lived in are a wreck; houses that are dead museum pieces are perfectly arranged.

"Would you be able to help me clean up the mess? I just want it to look nice for having guests."

Oh, there it was. No, Fluttershy, I won't help you kill your house now that it's just started to look pleasant. "I'm so sorry, my dear, but chaos magic won't allow me to organize something that's chaotic and make it orderly. You understand, I'm sure."

"Oh, of course I do! Don't worry about it, then, I'll take care of it myself. But, um... broken jars of food and things like that... they aren't really chaos, are they? I mean, they are, but they're also unsanitary and spread disease, and I'm sure that's not the kind of chaos you like..."

I didn't know Discord's opinion on that, but I knew I wasn't personally a fan of getting sick. I probably couldn't get sick in Discord's body, but I wasn't willing to inflict getting sick on ponies... not by accident. Maybe if there was a good reason for it, but even then, I'd rather do it with my magic where I could control it than with actual germs I had no control over. I sighed. "Very well, I'll help clean up any filth I see, but you do of course understand I have no power over clutter." I strongly suspected I was lying about this, because with telekinesis I ought to be able to do anything that involved moving things around even if I couldn't just snap my fingers and make it clean itself, and if that failed I could probably use my paws to pick things up... but come on. Being a god of chaos has to be good for getting out of chores, doesn't it?

"That's perfectly fine! Whatever you can do would be helpful."

So that's how I got snookered into making food that was lying all over the floor from a broken jar flow back into the jar, losing all the dust and dirt it had collected in the process, and then making the jar repair itself. Reversing entropy was weird and unusual and therefore counted as chaos, right? Except entropy was chaos, right? But surely doing something impossible counted as something within Discord's bailiwick. Maybe it was disharmony. Entropy's only supposed to go in one direction, so reversing it messes with the harmony of the world, right?

I wondered if Discord had had anyone to talk to about this stuff. If he'd even thought about it. He'd seemed to be very intelligent in his first appearance, aside from that incredibly stupid bit about not noticing that the Elements of Harmony were working again, but I've made almost equally dumb mistakes and I'm pretty smart. I didn't know how introspective he was, though. Me, I can overanalyze anything.

I didn't actually like the concept of a fancy dinner party. Some of my most humiliating memories come from the foster family where there were six other kids and the mom seriously thought that the way to give poor non-white kids without parents a leg up on the rest of the world was to teach them etiquette, like what fork goes with what course kind of baloney, and all the other kids knew it because she'd been teaching them longer, and I couldn't manage to learn, mostly because I thought it was so stupid that I didn't want to put any effort into it. But it turned out I remembered enough about it to kind of replicate it to decorate Fluttershy's dining room, while she cooked a meal. Some kind of potato pastry, and carrot muffins with apple slices on top, and a cold vegetable soup. Didn't sound really filling to me, but on the other hand, the thought of killing an animal for meat, in this world where animals could practically talk, was kind of appalling. I supposed if I really missed hamburgers, I could pop myself up one with magic.

Obviously, it took her a lot longer to make the dinner than it took me to decorate for it. I did go through a few different iterations, trying to get it just right, because I wanted to impress Fluttershy – not for herself, but to lull her into a false sense of security and maybe actually get her to think her plan was working – but none of it took me very long. Fluttershy praised me for how nice it all looked – plush purple cushions with gold edging and tassels, an extra-size irregularly-shaped table large enough to accommodate six ponies, a small dragon and a draconequus, and fine china dishes. No silverware because apparently that's a unicorn thing.

I thought about her reaction when she learned I'd been playing her, and wondered if I cared, and wondered why I was wondering. It had never bothered me to screw around with social workers, because they were liars. They'd tell you to feel free to express yourself, but then if you started trying to rip an action figure's arms off so you could see how they worked, they'd "redirect" you, their polite term for taking it away from you, and if you drew pictures of dragons eating villagers because the virgin sacrifice hadn't wanted to admit to anyone she was gay and had made out with her girlfriend the night before, they would try to get you to draw something else, something positive, or else waste your time asking why you would draw such a thing and what did it mean to you and were you angry at lesbians? (The answer was no, of course I wasn't angry at lesbians; I just thought the whole idea of a virgin sacrifice was stupid, because what counts as sex? The virgin sacrifice was a lesbian because it was funny. The dragon was eating the villagers because what else would a dragon do if presented with a virgin sacrifice who wasn't actually a virgin? False advertising doesn't seem like something a dragon would be thrilled with.)

But Fluttershy had told me to feel free to express myself, and then put up with me rotating her house and wrecking her stuff. I was fairly sure that none of the social workers or counselors who'd I'd ever met would have done that, even if they'd been able to fly.

She was a manipulator, just like them. Her end goal was to get me to conform, just like them. But I got the feeling she actually believed her own horse puckey. That she seriously thought that offering to be friends with me was such a wonderful bribe, it would make me stop doing what gave my life meaning.

I meant, Discord's life. Or did I? The longer I was here, the harder it was to tell the difference. And if this was going to be the rest of my life, was it a difference that made a difference? (Answer: Yes. Unless I have conscious access to Discord's memories and I know he's not coming back, it's important for me to remember I'm not him. Or wasn't always him.)

But I didn't have anything else to give my life meaning. I'd never found anything back home as a human that I wanted to devote my life to doing; I'd spent my time playing pranks, trolling people who took themselves too seriously on the Internet, and plotting out elaborate not-actually-crimes that hinged on doing something legal and normal and taking it to a ridiculous extreme, like paying for a new Xbox 360 with thirty thousand pennies. (Most such plots never came to fruition, but that one actually did.) My grades had always been bad even though my mastery of the topics was high, because I couldn't be bothered to do homework, and I'd gotten myself expelled from college before I could figure out what I wanted to do with myself after it was over, and then I'd ended up homeless... hell, as nearly as I could tell, causing chaos and disharmony was what I'd spent my life doing. Oh, and art, but I'd never been satisfied with anything I could create because it didn't look enough like it did in my head to be worth making. Now, with these powers, I could make anything I imagined pop into existence, looking exactly as I'd pictured it.

So, okay. Chaos is what gives my life meaning, and using these powers is the best possible thing that could ever have happened to me, and I'm not giving any of it up. So Fluttershy could go soak her head. Maybe she would get upset when she found out I'd been playing her. Maybe she'd cry, boo-hoo. I didn't need to care. She was a social worker just like all the others. She just wasn't as disillusioned as the ones back home were, so she actually believed her own garbage.