“Twilight Sparkle! Where are you, young lady? You are in a heap of trouble!” Twilight Velvet called out as she searched her house, having checked the likeliest hiding places and now checking the improbable ones. Another vase had been broken, and while her magical-prodigy daughter would fix it eventually, if a tad too creatively, it was the principle of the thing. Child breaks vase, parent chastises child, even when the vase had been a gift from Great Aunt Ostentia which would have been mathomed into the attic in a year or so.

Twilight Sparkle was nowhere to be found, but Twilight Velvet had been through this before and wasn’t unduly worried. She abandoned the search, and went to make some tea. Her little filly had found some unknown and very effective way to hide from her own family, but always reappeared in time for dinner. Making a batch of cookies had been known to improve the response time.

All the time her mother was calling her, Twilight Sparkle was smug, snug, and secure in her own private world. Ever since that one day in Magic Kindergarten where she’d made such a mess and the noodles had gotten everywhere and everyone had laughed at her, she’d felt an odd feeling when she teleported, as if there were an alternate destination available. One day, after many tries, she followed it and found a place she called the Safe Zone, a name she’d read on a school pamphlet.

It was a roughly cylindrical room, sometimes with stony grey walls, sometimes with soft padded walls of dark tan, but the floor was always a thick layer of warm felt that was nice to snuggle into. The ceiling appeared visually as a source of soft blurry light, and to her magical sense as a series of folds beyond her ability to unravel. She probed the area thoroughly for hidden traps and dormant monsters as recommended in her O&O manual, and verified that she could easily come and go as she pleased, then brought in parts of her comic book collection and toys, bit by bit, until she had claimed the space as hers, a cozy refuge from angry parents and embarrassing social situations.

As she grew, she returned to the problem of the odd ceiling and walls with little success, until she found a promising theory concerning pocket dimensions. Under this theory, she couldn’t pierce the ceiling because there was nowhere else to teleport to, locally, within that tiny dimension; it converged to a constricted matrix at the perimeter, with all the transport vectors involuted. Since all the available evidence supported this conclusion, Twilight shelved the problem. And over the years, the comic books were supplanted by notes and tomes, and the Safe Zone became a study area, unknown even to Spike, where Twilight could study intensely, free from interruption.

One day, Princess Twilight Sparkle was napping in the Zone, and dreamed that she was being gently scratched between her ears. She smiled in her sleep and snuggled into the feeling, but the scratching grew more insistent and annoying. She was just starting to waken when she was entangled in a huge white stringy mass, and hauled, squealing and struggling, through the ceiling and into bright blinding light!

“Twilight?” said Discord, squinting at the empurpled end of his cotton swab.

“Discord!?” she shouted, flapping her legs and trying to run with her wings. “Where am I? What are you doing!?”

“To answer your last question first,” he smirked, “I was cleaning my navel. I do it once every fifteen thousand, seven-hundred and eighty-two years.”

“You mean–” Revulsion wrinkled her snout. “My Safe Zone is in your navel? I was sleeping in your belly-button lint all this time?”

“Well, at various times,” he mused. “Your teleports must have intersected my worldline at discontinuous and even nonconsecutive intervals.”

“No… Wait.” Twilight was panicking, breathing with wheezy little whinnies. “You’re the physical manifestation and personification of entropy. You are an emergent property of the universal trend towards thaumaturgic self-consistency!”

Discord sighed, rolled his eyes and gave a curt, grudging nod.

“You were never even born in any meaningful sense! So why do you even have a navel?!”

He snorted. “Don’t be so omphaloskeptic. Trust me, you’d prefer not to know.”

“I do want to know!” she shouted. “Tell me!”

“Very well. It’s there so Celestia can park her chewing gum–”

Twilight’s horn blazed, and an instant later, there was an orange where Discord had stood.

A navel orange.