The small miniscule blob didn’t react as Discord poked it. He was currently small enough to only be seen through a microscope stronger than any in existance, walking along the rows of Discords set up on the edge of a ruler. It was so wide it’d take him days to walk from one edge to the other, yet still so crammed full of tests that he had to hold his tail up like the train of a dress to avoid smacking into himselves which milled around with blobs. He also had to watch where he stepped, as even smaller hims –too small to even wear their bodies– scattered about with strands of acid trailing behind them. He’d already checked that the mixing stage was in production, and now he was testing if this –third or fifth?– batch of product was up to scratch.

He poked the blob again. It collapsed into the hands of Discord.

Discord threw it away, sighing to himself as walked away while shrinking and removing his body. Back to the mixing for him. Discord just shook his head and moved onto the next him.

That made yet another failure.

And the most annoying thing? He wasn’t even failing at making babies now. He’d tried to go straight to baby-making, but quickly realised he’d need to start smaller. So now he was just trying for a hair-follicle.

An itty-bitty stupid hair. And it seemed he couldn’t even do that.

Still, this was for Fluttershy. So he kept trying, over and over, to mash the instructions together in different ways. He stacked them on top of each other, he stirred them like spaghetti, knitted them together… It was lucky he could multitask so well, or this would have taken years.

The next Discord’s blob seemed very promising –it had become two! That was progress!!

He clapped his wings together in glee… until Discord leaned over and murmured something into his ear. He fixed Discord with a glare.

“Did you just create a copy of your cell?”

Discord gave him an innocent look. “Isn’t that what the point is? To have more than one?”

“No! It has to be the one to make more of itself!” He poofed the offending cell, and the him that made it, out of existence. He teleported over to the edge of the ruler, sitting down with a huff.

Discord came over and sat down next to him. “What’s eating you, old chap?” He grabbed the leech stuck to Discord’s neck and flicked it off the edge. “Let’s go back and continue.”

“What’s the point? It’s never going to work!”

“No. I and I should know better by now; if we do something randomly long enough, we’ll eventually loop right around to, heughh, order.”

“But that’s the issue, innit? I can try forever and make order, but Flutterhy’ll be… gone, by the time I manage it.”

He threw his hands up in the air.

“And that’s the most annoying part! This entire thing is just chaos creating order, so why can’t I do it!? Start with a precarious order that can collapse into chaos at the smallest change, make the smallest change randomly, and, and, and there’s new order? Somehow?”

The hands landed on his head with two thumps.

“To be fair,” Discord said, grabbing and putting one of the hands on his shoulder. “A lot of times the result is chaos too. Just happens that the order ones are the ones who survive enough that I meet them. I think… we start with order, add small amount of chaos, and get order a lot of the time. But I’m adding a lot of chaos, so I’ll get order a lot less times?”

“… I suppose. But I made a bunch of creatures with chaos, and they’re perfectly fine even now.”

“I mean… there are a lot less of them than I can… not completely remember.”

Discord stared into nothingness. He was too small to see for very long, so beyond the ruler there was an abyss of murky darkness.

“How many of them didn’t… ?”

“…don’t.”

This wasn’t helping. He stood up and turned around, facing the disco of Discords behind him.

“This isn’t working. I need to think of a new method. Let’s pack up.”

He all nodded, and set about removing the failed experiments, chatting softly among himselves.

“I thought mine was going so well too, until it just…”

“…tried to follow a pattern for mine for a bit. But you can guess how that…”

“… I mean, I’m a complete mess too, but I don’t fall apart.”

“That’s probably because I’m partially made from chaos. Chaos can’t make me into soup when I am -”

Discord stopped.

He was alone on the ruler, all of himself moving into one body again. He didn’t need to breathe, but he still let his lungs fill in wonder.

“It needs to be part chaos.”

He looked down at himself. Not at the body meat-people saw –in fact, he took it off for a second, letting it fall into a heap on the floor– but at his true form. Actually, ‘looking’ was a misnomer because it couldn’t be perceived via lightwaves, but it was the closest word in the limited vocabulary ponies knew he could use.

He swirled in random directions, forming concepts and ideas that popped and dissolved back into himself. A piece of him gently shifted out, out, out… and without any teeth to grit in preparation, he just snapped it off.

It didn’t hurt, he didn’t have any pain receptors. But it wasn’t good. It was very very bad in fact. So bad, so so so.. bad. Curse this vocabulary.

Badbadbadbad.

This was for Fluttershy.

He didn’t take a few deep breaths, couldn’t unclench any muscles, but he did slowly try to relax. With a snap of his imaginary claws, two blobs appeared in front of him. These were the real deal, can-grow-into-baby-cells, rather than the hair-follicle ones he’d been testing on; he didn’t much want to remove even more of himself, so he figured he’d try to only have to do this once.

The information strings were removed, unraveled, strung together, and remashed back together, and – he held out the piece in front of his face for a second– chaos added.

Immediately, the information string began to writhe and coil like a snake, shifting in colors that ponies have no words for. It might have been called beautiful or horrifying, depending on who you ask. Not that anything would have been able to see it; it was so small that his already miniscule paw was an ocean for it.

Grabbing one of the two now empty blobs, he reached into its center, and… stuffed the mess in there and closed it behind him.

And waited.

It hadn’t collapsed yet.

So he waited.

It moved.

He waited.

It expanded.

He wai-

It split in two.

It split in two!

Oh, stars, it split in two.

It was growing. It was working, it was growing. It could, theoretically, grow into a baby for Fluttershy, all he had to do was–

He grabbed his discarded meat-body and quickly put it on again, if for no other reason that that it would allow him to have his heart beat faster and his paws shake approprietly as he formed an egg around the cells, making sure to place it next to the yellow-egg-thing so it’d have food to eat. He also made the egg quite large; he wasn’t sure how big it could grow, and wanted it to have enough room. He could always shrink the egg later if needed.

Then, he waited again.

Inside the egg, the lump of cells continued to split and grow.

At first, he checked on the egg every day. Sometimes more, if a lot of things seemed to happen in it.

So he noticed when it had split even further, and attached itself to the yellow-egg-thing; good, he was worried that he’d have to somehow teleport food into it if it didn’t eat by itself.

He saw when it split itself in two, with one bloody mass staying attached to the yellow-thing and one mass attached to the first mass via a meat tube of sorts. He didn’t know how odd that setup was for an egg, but was worried still for a few days that something had gone wrong; the thing had just decided to split in two after all. But he calmed down as it seemed to not have any issues with continuing to grow.

He watched as brain-bits began to form, and pondered over how those things could create the complexity of thoughts in meat-creatures. They seemed random, yet pony thoughts were so structured. He approved of their weirdness, don’t get him wrong, but it was confusing.

He nearly let himself have a heart attack when the organs started to form though, since one of them wanted to try and grow in the wrong place. He was fairly certain that was the wrong place anyway; after double checking with a book he stole from Twilight, he teleported it to where he thought it was supposed to be. It continued to grow after that, so he just patted himself on the back for a job well done.

Once some time had passed, he calmed down on the hovering. The embryo seemed to be growing fine, and he had more important things to do.

So he didn’t see when the limbs grew longer, but was pleased when he noticed them.

He missed the formation of more neurons, but he took notice that the brain was growing bigger. He supposed that was a good thing; talking meat-creatures often had very large brains compared to animal ones.

He also missed the first time it moved one of its limbs, as what would eventually become a long furry tail curled itself up and extended again. Though, he did see that it had changed position slightly, and decided to move the egg to a place he didn’t pass as often, figuring that he’d bumped it which caused the fetus to move.

After this, he only gave it cursory glances to ensure that it hadn’t died, and waited for it to be done so he could hand it over.

So he completely missed how it would wave its tail around and grip it with a tiny paw.

He never saw it react by moving its head and opening its mouth as he sang loudly to himself while he uncleaned his ceiling.

The finest of fur started to grow along its back and tail, its eyes moved behind eyelids, and it waved its limbs around more and more; easily flipping around in an egg that was much too big for it.

Discord noticed none of this; he only checked that the heart beat and that it wasn’t brain dead, none of which required him to actually look inside the egg.

If he had, he might not have been as surprised the one day he decided to stay a little longer. He’d heard that it had a heartbeat, and was checking that it still had brain activity for what felt like the umpteenth time.

“Are you done yet? I want to give you to Fluttershy already”

The brain… flared with attention. Startled, he jerked back. He stared at the egg like it might hatch at any second, and carefully moved closer again.

“Did… did you…?

He went intangible, and peeked into the egg, changing his eyes to be able to see in the almost complete darkness. The fetus opened its eyes slightly, and wiggled its legs in his direction.

He knew it probably couldn’t see him; inside the egg was very dark, and it didn’t react to his muzzle appearing next to it. But still…

He picked up the egg carefully.

The fetus could hear him.

He knew this had been the goal, but to actually see it was different. And not to say he hadn’t done similar things before; giving inanimate objects or plants the ability to think and set them loose was practically his calling card. Tartarus, even animals he’d changed and given more complex thought to all the time.

But this… he’d not given them anything except the conditions to grow in, and a bit of starting material. This was all them –and now…

They were actually alive.

And judging on how complex their brain activity already was, they were well on their way to becoming an actual sapient baby.

Fluttershy would be so happy.